After breakfast I gave Metunga a bollicking out. He was to stretch his pilots, not break them. And he was to make sure his squadron leaders understood that. I think he’d expected it, and factored it into what he’d done. According to Leanne though, he’d established the pecking order on the ship in the only way his kind understood. It made me issue a warning to Jill, Fina, and Dorm to keep an eye on their charges, in case cats thought cats should be making the decisions.
Jill sent me back a long laugh, and a vid showing her ship AI being dominant puss, with what looked like an offhand and very deliberate paw swipe knocking a squadron leader’s mug off the mess table. Even though it was not the same kind of cat, it was obvious the pilots were taking the AI seriously, and thus Jill seriously. I hoped that would be the case into the future. It made me wonder how the cat militaries operated, and if Imperium rules had actually sunk in when they agreed to be Imperium pilots.
The squadron leaders meeting went off fairly well. Brown emphasized that in a destroyer sized ship, the navy captain was their CAG, and while Judge rated an actual CAG, it wasn’t the case in this ship either. So the ship captain would be giving commands, especially while they trained as a squadron. He went on to explain fleet commands came from me, through Lieutenant Serena, and more importantly Tamsin, her AI. As fleet XO, she would be giving wing orders.
I told them they’d done alright yesterday evening, but the raggedness would need to be practiced out as fast as possible. Seconds counted in combat now, and we might not be safely out of range all the time. Jumping a fraction of a second late might get the pilot killed. We needed precision jumping, and every gun and torpedo firing at the same time. This meant every pilot had to be communicating with their co-pilot using their PC, and not their mouth. I told them to make sure their pilots knew what was expected.
I’d scheduled a patrol around the inside of the cluster, and told them we’d be spending ten minutes in each system, during which their formations would be changing according to the whims of their CAGs. This caused some of them some concern, so I emphasized the need to be able to change formation either by flying or jumping in an instant. Especially if squadrons or even individual ships went in against targets where being there more than a second could be fatal. Most of them grasped the need to hone their skills, although I was pretty sure the squadron leaders new to being in a cockpit hadn’t. Brown told me after, he’d keep an eye on them. They went back to their destroyers, to pass what had been said on to their pilots, and get them ready for the patrol.
Back on the bridge, I had Tamsin call up the new station’s AI, and I checked if there was any need for me to leave protection behind. I was told the station had five squadrons of Brawlers on board, with imitation pilots, which would be doing police duties. They were quite capable of dealing with recalcitrant civilian ships. The station also had a significant number of both security and combat droids on board, looking like a cross section of Imperium species, including the droids which had been on Diplomat and the Trixone station duty before.
The people and butlers who’d been operating kiosks on Diplomat were mostly now living on the liner, and had actual retail and office premises on the station. The corridors were half covered in dirt, to allow plants to walk more comfortably. The station itself was divided into an Imperium sector, and a Trixone sector, the latter mainly being dirt floors. It had no rifts of any kind.
My orders were to use it as a home base for now. The diplomats were hammering out an agreement for a Trixone presence on the station, and as soon as proper exchange rates had been put in place, leasing of space to the locals would begin, as would local freighters being able to start docking. There was already a bidding war going on for shuttle services between our station and the Trixone one, for traders either not willing to dock at our station, or for some reason not allowed to.
Half the docking was for Trixone ships, or their vassals, and the freight handling had an extra level to it, where anything destined for the Imperium was loaded into containers, and anything coming from the Imperium was unloaded before being moved to the docks. There was of course going to be a charge on the container rentals.
Before I set us going on our first patrol, several freighters jumped in, and I recognized them as being mine.
They had “Bud’s Boxes – We move anything anywhere.” on the sides, in large letters, in several languages.
I face palmed when Serena zoomed a screen in one of them.
Twenty Seven
Serena and the team ran the squadrons ragged.
I let her run the bridge, and retreated to my ready room. As we moved around the cluster, all the squadrons were jumping out and in, and moving into and out of different formations, none of them the same as any other at any one time. The squadrons of pilots new to actual ships at first had trouble not colliding with each other, and the AIs had to jump them out of trouble quite a few times. But they settled down after a while.
In the meantime, I looked for what the comnavsats were telling us in the way of planets, shipping, and possible problems or threats. There were a lot of Trixone fleets, but all of them were in orbit of a planet, and a lot of them were militia ships smaller than a destroyer, which still made them bigger than ours. Not much of a threat in the general scheme of things though.
On the other side of the closed off jump points, Rawtenuga fleets were still on the move, still finding themselves blocked, and obviously looking for a way in we’d missed. There was still a titan transport in the area, and it appeared to be heading towards what I knew was an inhabited planet. We knew almost nothing about who inhabited it though, as the comnavsat freighter hadn’t yet seeded the whole system.
“Leanne?”
“Bud?”
“Can you get me a call with Jane?”
“Sure. Now?”
“If she’s available.”
“Hold on.”
I blinked twice, and Jane’s head and torso popped up on my desk.
“What can I do for you, Commander?”
“Can you re-task your comnavsat freighter out here to put a comnavsat in orbit of the inhabited planet the titan transport is heading towards?”
“Why?”
“So we know if we need to go help them or not. Maybe contact them, and see if they want help?”
“You think they might?”
“I don’t know. I think we should check.”
“Can you deal with one of those on your own?”
“Possibly. I’d need to think about it.”
“You think about it then. We don’t have any backup for you at the moment. I will get the comnavsat laid for you. Anything else you want?”
She sounded bothered, but I didn’t let it put me off.
“Any chance we have a station in poor repair we can use as a real training ground for dinosaur actions? The training courses don’t really cut it, and the pilots I have simply don’t have the experience of anything to apply to what the courses can provide. Sending them into an actual station environment, and having them fight real dinosaurs would be much better training.”
“We could use the same thing,” said a female voice, I didn’t recognize. “We could set it up for any species we want to practice a station situation against. Come to think of it, if we’re wishing for things, we could use a few of those titan transports for ourselves.”
“We don’t have any spare stations,” said Jane. “If you find an abandoned one, by all means appropriate it. If you find one with purely dinosaurs on it, by all means take it, if you can. And likewise, if you can take a titan transport without completely destroying it, the general will be in your debt.” She didn’t say which general. “We won’t hold your breath though on that one. But if we’re going to do realistic dinosaurs for such a real station training facility, we’re going to need an actual dinosaur body to dissect. So far, no-one has bothered to collect one.”
“That I can do.”
I zoomed the navmap into my penal planet, and looked at the area wh
ere I’d dropped the dinosaurs in. And yes, there was a body unmoving, a distance from the others. It looked relatively intact. I pinged Leanne for a plan of where Jane was, received another screen with a floorplan showing me where on a station she was, and an empty space away from the occupants, and with a thought, I moved the body there.
It occurred to me about a second later, that hadn't been a good idea.
“Bloody hell!” exclaimed the Imperator.
I don’t know who cut the channel, but it ended, and I sat there for a moment.
Three women laughing their heads off came through the door from the bridge.
“Guess who’s never getting another promotion?” roared Serena.
I face palmed.
Twenty Eight
“Damnit!”
“What?” asked Leanne, even though I could hear her still laughing out on the bridge.
“I meant to ask when we were getting the new sidearms.”
“Shall I reconnect you?”
Her laugh intensified out on the bridge, even though the other two were starting to wind down.
“No, don’t do that.”
“We did get new combat suits.”
“Why new ones?”
“Changing the arm stunners to meson blasters took a lot of doing, apparently. It was easier to issue us with new ones, than to change the existing ones. They came in with the station last night.”
“So not just a matter of swapping arms?”
“No. They had to improve the power supply as well. The meson guns have their own power storage, and just take a top up from the suit after every pulse. But the new arm variants have no storage of their own, and so are taking all their power from the suit.”
“So running the suits out of power is a real thing?”
“Probably not in terms of a station boarding or a single ground action, but yes, it’s an issue.”
“Do we have enough for all the pilots?”
“Yes. Even all the cats have special cat versions. Someone was planning this for a while, even if it happened suddenly.”
Jane. Had to be. Of course, she’d know the feeling among fighter pilots all too well, and know exactly what Eagle was up to.
“Do they have a reserve?”
“What do you mean a reserve?”
“A level of power where the guns won’t fire, but the suit still has enough power to run away.”
“That they do,” she laughed.
Her laughing in two different places out of sync, but still in earshot, was nothing short of freaky.
“Right. Get them ready to be used. After lunch I want everyone in them for several hours.”
“Having already thrown them in the deep end, you intend to deepen the end on them?”
It took me a moment to figure that out.
“Yeah. You heard Jane. No backup. We might have to take that station the titan is heading for. Any chance of finding out if any of the locals are still on it? Or what is going on planet side?”
“Not until the comnavsat is put in orbit of the planet.”
“Let me know when that happens, if I don’t notice it.”
“What if they killed all the indigenous?”
“We’ll have to respond in kind. But I think not.”
“Why not?”
“The titan is heading there. No point in sending troops if the planet is already yours. Most likely the station is taken, and there are troops down on the planet, but no-one has surrendered down there. But I want confirmation if possible before we do anything.”
“Aye, sir.”
The question then became, how does one capture a titan without reducing it to a wreck first. Which had an obvious answer. One doesn’t. The thing carried divisions of troops. We already knew our combat suits were only marginally superior to dinosaur teeth and weapons. And what was effectively two heavy battalions of inexperienced combat suits, was no match for tens of thousands of dinosaurs.
The only way of doing it with the ships was battering down their shields, and then punching a hole through the hull somewhere. That would decompress the empty center, and then we’d need to send directed missiles to take out every airlock, and then find every closed bulkhead. It could be done, but not easily, and I was doubtful the squadron actually had the firepower to batter down a titan’s shields.
Unless. If we jumped inside it like Rogue had done, there were no shields, so it should be possible. But there wasn’t a lot of room in there. Judge would only just fit, although the destroyers would easily. We’d need precision jumping though. We could do it, but we’d have to take out the rear of the ship to stop it moving, and remove most of its power generation. Same as Rogue had done, and Rogue almost hadn't survived doing that. But we had mage shields.
The word ‘mage’ echoed through my mind, trying to make a different connection. When I made it, I couldn’t stop myself laughing.
“What’s up chuckles?” said Leanne, who out on the bridge, had only just stopped.
“Oh nothing.”
“Good nothing, or bad nothing?”
“Good. I think.”
“Still want them in combat suits after lunch?”
“Yes. One way or the other, they’re going to need to practice with them anyway, so it may as well be today.”
“They’ll be ready.” There was a quick giggle. “Let me rephrase that. The combat suits will be ready.”
It was nearly a half hour before the whole of the system I’d been waiting for went live. I zoomed in on my navmap, but Leanne beat me to it.
“Shit!”
“Tell me.”
“There are no life signs on the station. Someone opened it to space, with none of the internal bulkheads working.”
“What about the planet?”
“Barely habitable. There’s only one continent which looks like it could support intelligent life. Although there is small animal life on several others.”
“Could?”
“They nuked it.”
I felt my jaws tighten.
“So why would the dinosaurs be going there?”
“Two reasons I can think of. To claim the planet as a staging ground. Or a recreation stop. Three reasons. Or the titan is actually carrying colonists instead of troops.”
“How bad is the nuked area?”
“Highly radioactive, but only the actual settlements have been destroyed. If they’re tolerant to radiation, it’s probably still a vacation spot for them.”
“If not?”
“Then there are other places they can land in large numbers. The rest of the planet will get an increase in background radiation levels, but it will take a while, and nowhere else will turn lethal.”
“So we should wait and see where they go when they arrive.”
“Won’t that be too late to do anything?”
“We’re already too late. What matters now is we do the right thing.”
“And how do we know what that is?”
“I’ll let you know when I figure it out. Any idea when it happened?”
“Very recently, but before you started looking. Most likely a day or two ago.”
“Find who did this.”
“Damned right I will.”
Twenty Nine
Lunch was a somber affair.
I invited all the captains and squadron leaders to Judge, and then had all the messes connected into a single channel, with them all seeing me on a screen. I laid out what we’d discovered. The general reaction was horror.
“Do we know who did this?” asked a panther.
“We think so. By the time we’re ready to respond, we’ll know for sure.”
“How are we going to respond?” asked Woof.
“You’ll get your orders in due course. We received brand new dinosaur killing combat suits last night. Straight after lunch, everyone is going to start running laps around the tracks in them, before test running the new arm guns. Anyone who hasn’t fired a meson pulse rifle from a combat suit will have to
get used to them as well. I want everyone ready for whatever we have to do. Eat, and get ready to bring the pain.”
“SIR, YES, SIR!” came from those at my table, and from every other mess.
The channel closed.
“Did you mean pain?” asked Jill. “Or did you really mean bring the rain?”
“There won’t be any rain. Probably no pain either. We’ll hit them with lightning, and only the ones who are unlucky enough to survive it will feel any pain.”
“Damned right!” exclaimed Norden.
No-one spoke as we ate. No-one had coffee. No-one said a thing as they left.
I went back to my ready room, but before going in, I noticed neither AI was sitting on the bridge, and Serena hadn't followed me. I changed direction to my chair, and then started looking at the other bridges. No-one was on them either.
Two hours later, with everyone having a break before we did combat launches again, I had targets. We had a break in that the previous fleet to visit the planet had left through a jump point we had a view of. And had stayed in our area of view as it headed around our cluster. The fleet was two systems away now, and thirty two ships strong.
Their position caught my eye, and I smiled.
The squadron jumped out to a system which had nothing of importance in it, meaning we’d not be seen while we trained. I’d had Tamsin plot a new jump out grid, and Serena pushed them into repeatedly jumping out into all three formations.
After half an hour of just jumping out and back in, I sent the squadrons off to do some formation flying on their own. A lot of the pilots needed time in the cockpit just moving somewhere. I gave it to them, and then had them jump to the nearest asteroid field and do formation flying through that. AIs had to jump ships to avoid collisions to start with, but they slowly got the hang of real flying, and pilots and co-pilots began to mesh together.
No-one said a word through dinner. I sent my captains to eat with their pilots, and Serena and I did as well. The tension in the room was very evident. All they wanted to know was when. But no-one asked. And I didn’t say. But the moment I rose from my chair, everyone did likewise.
Lieutenant Commander Spacemage (Imperium Spacemage Book 4) Page 12