“We might have enough people aboard with the bandwidth capacity, but only a few would have appropriate training,” Chownyk noted, echoing Kyle’s own thoughts. “They’d slow you down…but I guess better slow fighters than no fighters.”
“Exactly,” Rokos told them. “If I can’t get people with both the training and the implant bandwidth, I’ll take people with the training: missileers and engineers trained in drone and nanotech work.”
“Taylor, Chownyk?” Kyle asked.
“I’ll have to talk to my Chiefs,” Taylor said swiftly, suggesting that she’d clearly learned the key rule of how to run a department aboard a Navy warship. “But I think we can pull people out of the launcher crews who are rated to target and run a missile launch. They won’t be able to do much else aboard your fighters, but we made sure everyone aboard Chameleon was rated for both capital and fighter missiles.”
She paused, considering. “They’ll all be enlisted, though,” she pointed out. “Possibly not even Petty Officers.”
“If any of my people has a problem with an enlisted running their missiles, I’ll set them damn straight,” Rokos growled. “We put three people on a starfighter for a reason.”
“I’ll have to check with Ajam and his Chiefs, but I’d guess the engineers will be the same,” Chownyk concluded. “They’ll have the skills but not the implant bandwidth or the commission.”
“If they can run the nano-repair and the drones at all, we need them. We won’t be at a hundred percent efficiency, but better forty fighters at eighty percent than twenty-six at one hundred.”
“Run it through the Chiefs, people,” Kyle told them, “but make it work. We have few enough resources for this mission as it is. If we can get the Wing back up to strength, that gives us options.”
He glanced back at Rokos.
“You’ll need me to sign off on another promotion to Flight Commander?” he asked.
“A bunch of Junior Lieutenants to Flight Lieutenants,” Rokos replied, “but I don’t need a Flight Commander. I’m going to have to unground Cavendish—I don’t know if I can trust her, but I do know she can do the job.”
“It’s your call,” Kyle told him. Reinstating the black-ops pilot would make Glass happier, he knew, but he also had no hesitation backing Rokos’s decision to ground her.
“She can fight,” the CAG said grimly. “I just don’t want her behind me.”
#
In the inviolable sanctuary of Alcubierre-Stetson drive, it was an open question amongst military theoreticians and actual officers just what the best use of the crew’s time was. Most agreed that maintaining the ship—primarily the drive itself—was a key priority, but that was hardly enough to fully occupy the thousands-strong crew needed to run the ship safely in real space.
Exercises, training, paperwork—these were the things that kept the crew occupied in FTL. This worked most efficiently when the entire crew was on the same day cycle, resulting in the “FTL dark watch” by the middle of any long flight—a watch where only the minimum crew were on duty.
They were over an hour into that watch when Russell stepped into PriFly. Given that flight operations were impossible in FTL, it was a truly skeleton crew holding down the dark watch here—two Petty Officers, a Chief Petty Officer, and Flight Commander Laura Cavendish.
She sat on the central command chair like it was a throne, her eyes darting from screen to screen in silence. Despite the appearance of rigid control and utter coldness, however, Russell could see from the door that one of the Petty Officers was playing a video game and the other was reading a novel, both on their work consoles.
Perhaps she wasn’t as much of a lost cause as he thought.
Smiling to himself, he stepped into the control center.
“Good evening, people,” he rumbled, attracting everyone’s attention and ignoring the not-particularly-surreptitious activation of “boss programs” to switch screens away from their technically illicit uses.
“Chief Lipskold, if you could take the Commander’s watch, please?” he asked. “I’m sure you’re up to the many and varied challenges.”
His airy hand wave covered the mostly blank screens of the room.
“Commander Cavendish, my office, please,” he instructed.
He turned on his heel, taking an admittedly somewhat childish pleasure in upending everyone’s evening, and walked the exactly fifteen steps to his office. Swinging behind his desk and taking a seat, he waited for Cavendish as he dug through his desk.
“What do you need, sir?” Cavendish asked. The appropriateness of her words was more than a little undermined by the impatience and disgust dripping off her tone.
He sighed. Unfortunately, he needed her more than he needed to like her.
“Here.” He slid her wings across the table. “I’m un-grounding you and placing you back in command of Echo Squadron.”
“You dissolved Echo Squadron after you got almost all of my people killed,” she snapped. “What exactly am I assuming command of?”
“The same hodgepodge of qualified crews, unqualified pilots, and co-opted Navy personnel the rest of us will be leading,” he said flatly. “We’re pulling together forty flight crews that probably won’t accidentally blow themselves to bits when they launch. We have ten days to train them on Scimitars and Katanas, and then we will take them into action against impossible odds to try and turn the tide of this war.
“You’re a hothead and I can’t trust you, but you’re also one of the only experienced squadron commanders I have,” he told her. “I need you.”
“A little late to be admitting that, isn’t it?” she snapped.
“Don’t assume I can’t promote someone else,” Russell warned you. “This is a second chance—but a lot of people died at New Edmonton because of you. Fuck up again and I will end your career. Do you understand me, Commander Cavendish?”
She nodded sharply.
“I understand that you’re desperate,” she said. “Make no mistake, Commander; there will be a reckoning for my people’s deaths. But I’ll take your squadron. I’ve trained worse.”
“Good,” he said after a moment’s silence, more shaken by her implied threat than he could let her see. “I’ll see you at the squadron commander’s briefing in the morning.
“Good night, Commander.”
#
Chapter 34
Deep Space, Under Alcubierre Drive
15:00 June 10, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
“Do you think it will work?”
Kyle considered Chownyk’s comment as he and his XO stood on one corner of the flight briefing, currently packed with the mix of Navy and Space Force personnel who were going to be taking his ship’s fighters into combat.
“It doesn’t have to work perfectly,” he said quietly. The five Flight Commanders were moving through the crowds, passing out flight crew assignments. “It just has to work well enough to get every one of those starfighters into space.
“They’ll do well enough for that,” he concluded. It wouldn’t be the first time a star nation had put people into starfighters who didn’t have enough implant bandwidth to enter the full immersion network normally used to fly the smaller ships. You couldn’t pilot a starfighter effectively without it, not in a combat environment, but it wasn’t as necessary to have the gunner and flight engineer able to join the network.
“Even if they were only going to be flying at half capability—which they’re not—just having the birds in the air makes a huge difference,” Kyle continued. They would arrive late in the day on June Twenty-First, which gave him almost eleven days to percolate his plan.
The first planning sessions were tomorrow. However this mess broke down, it wasn’t going to be pretty—but having five full squadrons of Commonwealth starfighters was going to help.
“A third of the people flying them have never even set foot in a starfighter before,” Chownyk noted aloud. “I can’t help but worry.”
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“Rokos has ten days to get them in order. A hundred hours of sim time isn’t enough to fully qualify someone for the jobs we’re asking them to do,” Kyle admitted, “but it isn’t nothing, either. We’ve given him the best people we can; now it’s down to him.”
His careful study of the crowd suggested it was time for him, and he gave Chownyk a reassuring nod and a bright grin as he walked up to the briefing podium.
“All right, people,” he barked, drawing the attention of everyone in the room.
“First, I want to thank the Navy people in the room,” he told them. “We’ve asked you to do the impossible and we gave you six hours to decide. In the finest tradition of the Castle Federation Space Navy, you all volunteered.
“I’m sure the fact that this is going to look fantastic on your next promotion review had nothing to do with it.” He gave them all a grin, one met by chuckles from around the room. “But I want you to know that I, personally, appreciate you being willing to step up.
“You know what we’re up against. We’re going to have to be sneaky and we’re going to have to be smart. We’re going to be up against some of the Commonwealth’s best. Listen to Wing Commander Rokos and the Space Force people you’ve been assigned to; these squadrons are veterans of some of the toughest fighting of this war so far.
“What would you expect, after all?” he asked them. “They’ve been flying for me.”
Kyle gestured Rokos up to the podium.
“Now Wing Commander Rokos will let you know just how busy your next ten days are going to be,” he said wickedly.
“Good luck, people.”
#
Russell replaced the Captain on the stage, trading nods with the more massive man as Roberts disappeared back to the multitude of tasks involved in running a warship, even one eleven days from emerging from the sanctuary of FTL.
“All right, people,” he echoed Roberts. “The Flight Commanders have, by now, made sure everyone knows who their flight crews are and, perhaps most importantly, who your pilot is.
“Get to know these people and the rest of your squadron,” he instructed. “When the shit hits the fan, your pilot is going to be the first person keeping you alive—but remember, pilots, your engineers are going to be making sure you have power for your fancy maneuvers, and your gunners will be running your antimissile suites.
“You’re going to be relying on your flight crew. After them, you’re going to be relying on your squadron, and then on the rest of the Wing and on Chameleon,” he reminded them. “Get to know each other, because how well you work together may well decide whether you live out the month.”
The room was very quiet, and Russell scanned his gaze across the faces in front of him. He met Cavendish’s eyes as the Flight Commander glared at him, and his own words made him wonder if reinstating her was a mistake.
“The rest of you: our Space Force veterans, I have two key tasks for you,” he continued. “Firstly, back up your new people. Most of our Navy seconds have never set foot in a real starfighter before. You need them as much as they need you. Don’t hold back your experience and knowledge, even from somebody else’s crew—avoiding the mistake you warn of today may allow them to save your life in Tau Ceti.
“Second, I need you to study Commonwealth doctrine. Hard. The one big advantage we have going into this is that we’re flying starfighters they’re not going to register as hostile. The better we can fake being Commonwealth, the more confused they’re going to be!”
The thought of what they were going to try and pull on the Terrans was going to feature in his nightmares for a long time, he knew. Friendly starfighters suddenly opening fire? They had no choice, but he didn’t have to like it, either.
“You have an hour to get to know your new crews,” he warned them, “then we’re going to lock you all into starfighters in simulator mode. We have ten days for me to put you through the wringer, and I warn you now: don’t expect to be doing much other than sleeping and training.
“We have too much ground to make up to do anything else.”
#
“Well?” Russell asked.
“Moving starfighters around without the ability to take them outside the hull is excruciatingly difficult on this ship, sir,” Master Chief Petty Officer Hanz said flatly, the squat woman studying the crude solution they’d come up with.
“So you cut a hole in the side of the flight deck,” he noted. “I agreed to that, Chief. Please tell me it worked.”
Thankfully, Terran starfighters were cylindrical instead of the wedges favored by the Federation, so they’d “only” had to cut a circular ten-meter hole in the interior end of his flight deck. Then through the thankfully empty set of quarters there, followed by a water storage tank that they’d needed to install a tunnel through, and then a final ten-meter hole into the cargo hold they’d stored the Katanas in.
Ugly as the hole was, he was watching the rounded eight-meter-wide and twenty-meter-long shape of a Katana starfighter emerge from it like it was laying a giant metal egg.
“The Scimitars are all out,” Hanz reported. “We… Well, we broke one.”
“You broke a starfighter? How?” Russell demanded. While starfighters were unarmored tin cans by the standards of their threat environment, they were still armored against the demands of relativistic velocity in open space and hardly fragile.
“With another starfighter,” she said sadly. “We mucked up an angle and a speed and rammed one Scimitar into another. The movement cradles kept the first one intact, but it went four meters into the other one.”
She shrugged. “That was part of why we moved the Scimitars first. This way, we’ve found the likely glitches and lost one of the ships we were putting in storage.”
The Katana Russell had been watching finished inching its way out of the hole and the flight deck’s machinery went to work. Once it was inside the zone where the deck’s robots could handle it, the odds of damage were almost infinitesimal as it was picked up and slotted neatly into the stall designated for it.
“That’s number four,” Hanz noted. “Intel did us proud and we have six more moving in over the next hour. That will give us a full Commonwealth-standard squadron of the beasts. Which one did you want?”
He shook his head.
“I’m keeping the Scimitar,” he told her. “Unlike most of the Wing, I have my full regular flight crew, which means we can handle being in an older bird with lighter weapons.” He held up a hand. “And I’ve already argued that out with Churchill and Roberts. My Wing, my call. Rank hath its privileges.”
“Usually when we say rank hath its privileges, it’s the privilege of the better ship,” she pointed out.
“The circumstances aren’t normal,” he replied. “How long until they’re all locked in and we can set up for sims?”
“Two hours,” Hanz promised. “Call it nineteen hundred to give me some leeway?”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Russell said with a grin. “These new crews need every hour in simulation we can give them.”
“It’ll happen,” she said. “I want them to have every minute of sim time I can buy them too, boss.”
#
Chapter 35
Deep Space, Under Alcubierre Drive
20:10 June 10, 2736 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Chameleon
Wing Commander Russell Rokos had trained new pilots and crews from scratch before, but normally they came in smaller batches. Two or three entirely new flight crews in a squadron of eight. Scratch-built squadrons assembled from the wrecks of previous groups, veterans who’d never worked together but veterans nonetheless.
Working up an entire Wing where almost every flight crew had at least one person who’d never set foot on a starfighter was worse. They’d been at it for three hours, well into the ship’s “night”, and every one of the exercises they’d run had suffered some kind of misstep.
He sighed aloud as the latest exercise disintegrated as a miscue sent
a spray of starfighter missiles into the heart of Charlie Squadron. Two virtual starfighters disintegrated as the friendly fire slammed home, arriving far too quickly for the antimissile suites to engage.
The entire Wing net went silent and he froze the simulation.
“Okay,” he said over the general channel. “Arguing over what just happened isn’t going to help anyone. We’ve hit the limit of what we’re going to usefully achieve tonight. Everyone is officially off duty until eight hundred hours tomorrow, when you should all be right back here.”
He cut the channel and dropped his face into his hands.
“Hopefully not shooting each other in the back,” he muttered aloud.
“To be fair, CPO Wong was fed an incorrect IFF sequence for targeting.,” Alvarado pointed out, his gunner looking equally tired. “That was from Junior Lieutenant Meissner aboard Flight Commander Ramada’s bird. Meissner was at Huī Xing with us. He should know better!”
“I know,” Russell admitted. “We start again in the morning and dig upwards.”
“Sounds like a plan,” his subordinate agreed, rising from his chair and then stopping in place, staring at the exit from the cockpit.
“Sir, can you order the door to open?” he asked slowly. Their flight engineer, Junior Lieutenant Gianna Cavalcante, was buried in the rear half of the ship. The two men were alone in the small cockpit at the front of the starfighter. “It’s ignoring my implant.”
That was strange, but Russell gave the order with a wave of his hand at the offending portal. His mind was focused on his plans for the morning’s exercise and it took him a moment to realize that the door still hadn’t opened.
“That’s very strange,” he said slowly, his attention finally on the here and now. Rising from his chair, he strode back to the door and tapped the command pad that acted as a secondary control. Nothing happened, and it remained stubbornly closed as he triggered a command override that would allow him to turn the fighter’s engines on inside the ship, let alone open a door.
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