The Right of the Line

by Christopher Nuttall

  Or perhaps not, he thought, as the alien starfighters accelerated. Someone had set the pursuit speed firmly on impossible. They’re going to catch up with us.

  “Damn,” Monica said, mildly. “We’re not going to make it back to the flak guns, are we?”

  “We’ll see,” Richard said. The alien starfighters closed rapidly, firing as they came. He’d made a mistake, he realised grimly. He should have pressed into the asteroid field or even stood his ground, rather than retreating. They were too far from the fleet to rely on the starships to cover their retreat. “I think ...”

  His controls locked. The display dimmed, the tactical outline covered by a pair of red-edged words. GAME OVER. Richard silently promised himself - again - that he’d hunt down the bastard who thought that was funny and show him what made Richard laugh. His mouthpiece suddenly felt heavy in his mouth, the constant chatter from his earpiece dimmed. He sighed as he watched the rest of the engagement, command constantly moving down the ladder as the alien starfighters wiped out the remaining senior officers. They’d definitely been caught with their pants down and ...

  I got caught with my pants down, he thought. His lips twitched as he remembered his first instructor, who’d pointed out - graphically - just how badly he’d let himself be sodomised during his first practice flight. The cadets had made bets on just how long it would be before the wanker had a heart attack - Richard didn’t think there’d been a single person who actually liked the instructor - but he’d had a point. We simply aren’t ready for a real engagement.

  He rubbed his eyes as the remaining pilots were blown out of space. They were good, better than he’d feared, but they weren’t a coherent team. Not yet. They’d do well against real aliens, he hoped - the simulated enemies were faster and more accurate than real enemies - but they still had their weaknesses. Richard sighed, then pushed back the canopy. He felt so tired and drawn that it was all he could do to stand up and clamber out of the simulator. His legs threatened to collapse the moment he touched the deck. He had to fight to remain upright as the remainder of the simulators emptied. He didn’t dare show any signs of weakness. He’d been pushing himself too hard over the last few days.

  Shower, he thought. And then bed.

  He dismissed the thought with a scowl. He was sweaty and smelly, but he didn’t have time for a shower. He didn’t want to admit it, yet ... he had to admit he was getting a little old for starfighter operations. A normal career path would have seen him moved upwards, into operations or command, or simply transferred to the reserves, allowing him to return to civilian life. He wondered, absently, if he could somehow get himself busted back down to Flying Officer, then told himself not to be stupid. It was rare for someone to be demoted that far down the ladder. It was far more likely that he’d be transferred to an asteroid base in the middle of nowhere and told to stay there. It was almost tempting.

  But I wouldn’t get to fly starfighters, he thought.

  “Briefing compartment, five minutes,” he said, once the pilots were assembled. “Move it.”

  He smiled, thinly, as the pilots hurried through the hatch. Most of them would be heading for the washrooms, if they had any sense. Pilots could urinate in the cockpit - it was one of the little details mysteriously left out of the recruiting brochures - but no one liked to use the bags. Far too many pilots remembered the stories about how aircraft and starfighters had crashed while the pilots were fiddling with the tubes. The jokes were appalling, but there was a serious point to them. Better to go while they were on the carrier than in the midst of a fight.

  The compartment emptied rapidly. He waited until the pilots were gone, then reached into his pocket and dug out the stim. The plastic injector felt soft against his hand, as if it belonged in a children’s playset. Richard hesitated before pressing the tab against his bare skin and pushing hard. There was a brief, uncomfortable sensation - he’d been told the tabs had been deliberately designed to be unpleasant - followed by a rush of energy. The world seemed sharper, all of a sudden. It was an illusion - he knew it was an illusion - but it was hard not to feel as if he was finally awake. He gritted his teeth. He’d wean himself off the stims as soon as the ship was underway. He had no choice.

  He took a deep shuddering breath, then forced himself to stand upright and walk through the hatch. The constant humming of the carrier’s drives pervaded the air as soon as he left the simulator chamber. It felt new and strange, even hostile. He told himself, firmly, not to be silly. The drives needed to be tuned before Invincible left the shipyard. A drive failure was bad at any time, but he hated to think what would happen if the drives failed in the heat of battle. Or even in a transit system, without even a stage-one colony within reach. The Royal Navy would be dreadfully embarrassed if her first assault carrier had to be towed home ...

  And if the virus spots us, we won’t have time to go home, he thought, morbidly. A carrier that could neither fly nor fight would be a sitting duck. We’ll be blown out of space before we realise we’re under attack.

  The pilots were chatting to each other - too loudly for his peace of mind - as he strode into the briefing compartment. It was good to see that the various national contingents were breaking down into a single unit, although he’d decided - it felt like an eternity ago - that they would have to keep flying in their national squadrons, just to limit the prospect of a misunderstanding in the heat of battle. He wanted to think the simulations had exposed their weaknesses, giving him time to address them before they were pitched into a real battle, but he knew better than to believe it. The simulations weren’t real. Everyone knew they weren’t real. And that made it harder for the pilots to take them seriously.

  Particularly as we won’t be dodging through asteroid belts or trying to put a torpedo down a tiny exhaust shaft so we can blow up a moon-sized starship, he thought, fighting down a sudden urge to giggle. That never happens in the real world.

  He took the stand and studied the pilots as they quietened. It definitely looked as if a handful of international friendships - and relationships - had formed, although he found it hard to imagine that any of the newcomers had had time to do more than eat, sleep and fly endless missions in the simulators. He made a mental note to keep an eye on the situation - he’d have to say something if the relationships started to impinge upon professionalism - and tapped the podium for attention. The last of the chatter died away as the pilots looked at him. Richard felt a spasm of guilt. They were so young.

  “Well,” he said. “That was certainly an interesting disaster, wasn’t it?”

  There was a low mutter of agreement. He wondered, sourly, just how many of them blamed him for the disaster. Richard had set the simulator parameters after all, although he’d randomised as much as possible to ensure that he was caught by surprise as much as any of his pilots. The system wasn’t perfect, but it worked. It helped that they finally had real data to plug into the simulators.

  “So,” Richard continued, after a moment. “What went wrong?”

  “We lost,” an American pilot said.

  Richard had to smile. “Specifics?”

  The American didn’t lack confidence. “Specifically, sir, we should have stayed closer to the carrier or pushed our way into the asteroid field,” he said. “If we’d taken out the enemy base, we might have been able to give the bastards something else to think about.”

  “Perhaps.” Richard kept his face expressionless. It would have worked, in the real world. There were hard limits to how many starfighters could be based on a carrier, let alone a makeshift asteroid base. But, in the simulator ... he shook his head. The pilots didn’t realise it, but they’d been deliberately sent into a no-win situation. The simulated aliens had an unlimited number of starfighters at their disposal. “Anything else?”

  “We lost cohesion as soon as the senior officers were taken out,” Francesca Bernardello said, stiffly. “The chain of command was shot to hell.”

  “That’s something we’re going to have t
o work on,” Richard agreed, calmly. “But we may not have the time to do it properly.”

  “We may need to harmonise pilot training,” Darren Vargas said. “Even a tiny difference can prove fatal.”

  “Particularly when we’re trying to reorganise our squadrons on the fly,” Richard said. It would have been a great deal easier if his command consisted solely of British pilots, who would have undergone identical training before deployment even if it was the first time they’d flown together, but ... he shrugged. It couldn’t be helped. “We’re going to have to scramble the squadrons together randomly and see what happens.”

  “Which won’t be particularly realistic,” Fritsch said.

  You have no idea, Richard thought, numbly. How many times had he had to reorganise a rapidly-dwindling number of starfighters? Too many ... and, every time, unit efficiency had fallen sharply. They would have improved, if they’d been given time. Every bloody simulated reorganisation leaves out the bloody reorganisation.

  “We have no choice,” Monica said, sharply. “Unless you actually want to start shooting down our own pilots ...”

  A faint chuckle ran through the compartment at the weak joke. Richard didn’t think it was particularly funny. His head was starting to ache in a manner that suggested he really hadn’t had enough sleep. He needed to go to bed, but he was too keyed up to rest. And besides, he simply didn’t have the time. His fingers were already reaching for another stim before he managed to stop himself. He’d already taken far too many for his own good.

  “I don’t think it will be necessary,” he managed. “Instead, we’ll start practicing reorganisation tomorrow. And we’ll establish new chains of command.”

  “Ouch,” someone muttered.

  Richard couldn’t disagree. Technically, there was a clear chain of command from the Squadron Leader right down to the lowliest Flying Officer. On paper, there should be no trouble identifying who was in command at any given moment. But, in the heat of battle, it wasn’t so easy. The person who took command - who needed to take command - might not be the person who, by the book, should be in command. Richard was all too aware of the potential for confusion at the worst possible time. God knew it had happened, time and time again, during the previous interstellar wars. He’d studied the records. The person who should be in command sometimes didn’t even realise he was in command until it was too late.

  “We’ll practice,” he said, although he doubted the simulations would do more than demonstrate the problem. There were just too many ways things could go spectacularly wrong. “And now ...”

  He glanced around the compartment. The youngsters were looking revoltingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but the older pilots were clearly feeling worn down by the endless simulations. He didn’t blame them. Starfighter flying was a young man’s game. The stats spoke for themselves. The older pilots were steadily losing their edge.

  “Get some grub ... and rest,” he ordered. He glanced at the chronometer. It was 1700. “We’ll resume regular exercises tomorrow. Dismissed.”

  He turned as the pilots started to hurry through the hatch and blinked in surprise as he saw Commander Daniel Newcomb leaning against the bulkhead. When had he entered the compartment? Richard felt his heart sink in dismay, and fought to keep his face impassive. There had been a time when he would have noticed, surely. It wasn’t as if the XO was a latecomer who was trying desperately to remain unnoticed ...

  “Commander,” he said. It was hard to keep his voice even. “What can I do for you?”

  “We’ll be departing tomorrow,” the XO said. “Or so we have been told.”

  Richard nodded. The departure date had been moved forward, then put back, and then moved forward again so often that he’d privately decided not to take anything for granted until the fleet actually left the solar system. He guessed there was probably yet another update lurking in his inbox. He hadn’t had time to check.

  The XO leaned forward. “Are we ready to fight?”

  Are the starfighters ready to fight? Richard had no trouble understanding what he was really being asked. And what about their pilots?

  “They’re better than I’ve told them,” he said, after a moment. He hadn’t had time to write proper reports. Thankfully, neither Captain Shields nor his XO had been inclined to complain about the lack. “There are a handful of issues that need to be solved, but we probably don’t have time.”

  “There isn’t time for a proper work-up,” Newcomb agreed. He sounded contemplative. “But they can fight?”

  Richard felt his legs threatening to buckle. He forced himself to stand straighter. “Yes, sir,” he said. “They can fight.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “I think the Americans are overcompensating for something,” Commander Newcomb said wryly, as they stood on the bridge and watched the task force assemble. “Just how big is that ship?”

  Stephen had to smile. USS George Washington was easily the largest fleet carrier the human race had managed to put into space, larger and more powerful than anything deployed by any of humanity’s friends or foes. She carried six wings of starfighters and mounted enough weapons to be a serious threat to anything she encountered, although neither the Americans nor anyone else had solved the problem of constructing a carrier that could also go toe-to-toe with a battleship. Stephen was inclined to think that the Americans had copied Invincible’s plans and scaled her up a little.

  “Big enough to make us look like a minnow,” he said, although it wasn’t really true. “And visible enough to draw attention from all over the system.”

  He scowled. He’d never really agreed with the strategists who insisted that the Royal Navy needed to constantly scale up its carriers. The Theodore Smith class was barely a decade old, and the planners were already designing its replacements. But Stephen himself wasn’t so sure. The larger the carrier, the bigger the target ... and the larger the hole in the line of battle if the carrier were to be taken out. A single Theodore Smith cost nearly three times as much as a single Invincible, giving the Royal Navy more flexibility ... it was a simple truth, he reflected, that a carrier could only be in one place at once. Better to have three ships than one ...

  “The Overcompensator class,” Newcomb said. “We should have time to test ourselves against her.”

  “It would be interesting,” Stephen agreed. George Washington had just been launched. He would be astonished if something didn’t go wrong during her maiden voyage. The whole idea of a shakedown cruise was to find and fix any problems before the carrier had to go into battle. The Americans were taking one hell of a gamble. “We’re still doing repairs, and they don’t even know their ship yet.”

  He shook his head. If he’d been in command of the fleet, he would have protested the assignment. It was impossible to predict what would go wrong with a newly-launched starship - or when. And Washington was the first of her class. Her crew hadn’t had the chance to serve on a similar ship. Simple inexperience would lead to all sorts of problems ... he put the thought aside. It wasn’t his place to lodge protests. Admiral Zadornov was probably grateful to have the American ship. On paper, at least, Washington nearly doubled the starfighters assigned to her fleet.

  “Never mind,” he said. He allowed his voice to harden. “Mr. XO. Are we ready to depart?”

  Newcomb’s face darkened. “As ready as we can be, Captain,” he said. “And better than I’d feared.”

  Stephen nodded, curtly. It wasn’t the ringing endorsement he’d wanted, but no experienced officer could have given one ... not when there were still too many issues that required a long stay in a shipyard to fix. Invincible was ready to depart, on paper, but ... he forced himself to keep his face impassive. Some of the problems could be fixed while they were underway. Others ... would just have to be compensated for, as best as they could. The war had taken a desperate turn. It was hard to think of his ship as expendable, let alone the remaining carriers and battleships assigned to the task force, but they were ... as long as the
y bought time for Earth to reinforce her defences and bring new weapons and starships online. And for help to arrive from the allied powers ...

  “Very good,” he said, finally. “Are there any major issues?”

  “The lower aft armour is noticeably weak,” Newcomb said. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Save for coating the plates with dummy armour and hoping the enemy fires dummy torpedoes at it,” Stephen said, wryly. The joke had been outdated well before the human race had begun the conquest of space. “A shame we don’t have time to make the entire hull look weak.”

  “No, sir,” Newcomb agreed. “But that would probably draw fire.”