by David Tatum
Orff had to have known he would be ‘demoted,’ though it was clear from the expression on his face he was far from happy with it. He was able to make himself say the right things, at least. “Of course, sir. Going from an Academy student straight to Lt. Commander is stretching things far enough; giving me command rank before I even graduate would be pretty extreme. And as captain, you should outrank your junior officers, after all.”
“Thank you,” Burkhard said. “Now, since the schedule is tight, would you please co-ordinate with Ensign Polk – who is still our purser, despite the re-org – to make sure that we have all of the supplies needed for an extended mission? We’ll have to leave within the next two hours, and this is our last chance to obtain everything we’ll need for the next three months. It wouldn’t do to run out of food on our first real mission, after all.”
“Yes, sir,” Orff replied, leaving the Chihuahua’s tiny conference room to find the logistics officer.
“I’m surprised you’re keeping him in the position of your first officer,” Beccera, now sporting the silver stars of the commodore’s rank on his Army uniform, just under the golden eagles of his colonel’s rank. It wasn’t a regulation way to wear the rank, but then his situation wasn’t exactly covered in the regulations. “I know you were unhappy with him.”
Burkhard grimaced. “Well, I hope he never has to take command of the ship in a crisis, but he’s capable of handling an exec’s duties fairly well. He can keep watch when nothing serious is going on, he knows how to delegate properly when executing my orders, and he runs the administrative side of things efficiently – he does all the paperwork better then I do. I’d rather have Ms. Katz as my first officer, to be honest, but I think she’s too valuable in her tactical position, and Orff... just isn’t any good anywhere else.”
Lieutenant Rappaport sighed. “Well, I could always give you Mr. Desaix to take Ms. Katz’s place, if you like, and Mr. Orff could be placed somewhere else where he won’t cause any trouble.”
“And rob us of our best engineer?” Burkhard laughed coldly. “You and he are just about the only people on this ship who really know engineering. Everyone else, while quite talented in their chosen field, is either untrained or a specialist. I’ve already given him watch duty, and that will tie him up enough as it is. Maybe when the rest of your team is all caught up in their training, I’ll consider it, but in the meantime he needs to work with you getting everyone up to a reasonable standard.”
“I also have another job in mind for your engineering staff, if you can handle it while running the ship and training everyone at the same time,” Beccera said. “I realize my role as Commodore is largely that of a figurehead, but there are a few tactical matters I imagine are the same whether you’re Army, Navy, or Marines.”
“Of course, sir,” Burkhard replied, emphasizing the ‘sir’ a little bit in order to show that – however much of a figurehead the man may think he was, Beccera was still officially his flag officer.
“This would be an ideal project for Mr. Desaix, actually,” Beccera continued. “It involves both tactics and engineering. If he wants others to work with him – such as Ms. Katz – I strongly encourage you to allow it, provided this doesn’t interfere with their other duties.”
Burkhard and Rappaport shared an amused grin. It was good to find something light to think about on a day like this. “I may agree to that, sir, if you’ll tell me what the project is. And, sir... just a point of protocol: As a flag officer you generally don’t order specific people on the ships under your command. One of the tenets of naval etiquette is that you ask the captain, and he’ll determine which people from the crew are best suited to carry out this task.”
“Of course,” Beccera replied, shaking his head ruefully. He might be new to the business of being a naval officer, but he clearly understood how command structures worked. He hoped he wouldn’t have to get too used to this whole flag officer thing. “Well, anyway... I may be a bit behind on naval tactics, but I imagine it’s important to follow the rule ‘know thine enemy’ regardless of which service branch you belong to. We’ll be receiving a copy of any data we can find on the attack, shortly, and I would like a team to go through these records. Determine just what it is we’re facing, what their tactical abilities are, what kinds of weapons they have, just how effective their stealth technology is, that kind of thing. I imagine it would take people well versed in engineering and tactics to get anything useful. I realize this won’t give you enough to make anything definitive, but I imagine any amount of analysis would be a step in the right direction, and it’ll be all we have to work with until the boys from Earth can give us something more to go on.”
“Of course, sir,” Burkhard said. “I’ll draft orders to that effect right away. Anything else?”
Dr. June Ehrlich, who had been listening from the side without comment, spoke up. “I would recommend that we start calling in the regular crew and interview them, not just the officers, sir. The crew is small enough we should be able to meet with everyone over the next few days, and it would give me a chance to assess whether anyone needs counseling after this tragedy.”
“Of course, Dr. Ehrlich,” Beccera replied graciously. “Mr. Burkhard, if you would call in the next person?”
“Of course, sir,” Burkhard said. He looked at his list, made a checkmark beside Orff’s name, and started a new list. Pressing a button on the comm, he said, “Chief Petty Officer Flint, please report to the conference room on the double.”
——————————
The tiny stateroom ostensibly belonging to Schubert and Desaix had become something of a lounge over the past few days, and this day – despite the attack that had so drastically changed all of their lives – was no exception. It was far more somber than usual, but there was still a definite clubhouse atmosphere in the air.
Couples were huddled together. Wolf was holding Weber as they were stretched out on his bunk. She was crying into his shoulder, having just learned that her older brother and both parents had been killed in the assault. Corporal Etcheverry sat in the one chair the room provided, Flint sitting on the arm of his chair. Rachel and Chris were together as well, sitting on his bed as they shared a mini-comp analyzing the attacker’s technology and tactics. Lt. Cmdr. Mumford, Ensign Cohen, and Lt. Diana Tarbell – one of the weapons control officers – had joined them.
This was the team intended to assess the enemy’s capabilities. Langer was supposed to join them later, but he was on the bridge with Orff and Polk while the ship was preparing to get underway. That would normally be Rachel’s job, at this time of day, but watches were being reorganized to better distribute veteran officer oversight. Conveniently, that same reorganization allowed the bulk of the team as much free time together as possible.
In many ways, they were the ideal team for the job. Rachel and Chris were perfect for analyzing both the tactics and the engineering in general, and each of the others could provide differing perspectives. Weber and Schubert would have insights into the demonstrated maneuverability of the enemy ships compared to most Earth Alliance ships. Etcheverry could provide the “out of the box” perspective of a layman, as well as insight on the kind of information a ground forces officer like Beccera would find useful for their report. Mumford, though far from having the sort of expertise that the experience granted to most communications officers in the Earth Alliance Navy had, was easily the most knowledgeable person on the Chihuahua when it came to signal analysis. Tarbell understood weapons analysis better than anyone else on board, and had the added advantage of a basic foundation in engineering through her class work. Flint, a genius when it came to environmental systems, had already begun running rather impressive calculations for a rough estimate of how many crewmen the ships were designed to support based on the atmospheric mix and density that each ship revealed when they were destroyed. When all that had been done, Cohen and Langer would be able to take all the analysis and run it through the computer to collate the d
ata and look for unexpected correlations.
The truth, though, was that this small group of Academy cadets always been the core team that kept Chihuahua running during the brief time they had been a crew. Of all the Academy students who had launched from Earth bound for the Chihuahua, this small group were the people who had proven to be the most ready for real duties, who could have set foot on any ship in the fleet and be a strength to the crew. There were others in the crew who contributed, many of whom were good at their jobs, but these were the people who made the ship work and set the tone of the crew’s character.
Burkhard must have recognized that when he assembled this analysis group. None of them missed the implication that this report was something their Captain felt was important. They recognized that many teams across the Earth Alliance would be studying the same data, but with something this critical the redundancy seemed only fitting.
Chris was looking rather stressed as he read the reports. His glasses were off his face and he was rubbing the bridge of his nose when he finally broke the silence which had been plaguing the room since he started the review. “Well,” he said. “I’m stumped.”
Heads from everywhere in the room turned to look at him at that. “Stumped about what?” Rachel asked.
Chris didn’t answer directly. Instead, he turned to Tarbell with a question. “Di, if you saw a battleship firing single barrel sixty inch broadside rail guns, how old would you say it was?”
“From a battleship?” Tarbell replied, surprised. “More then a century, at least. The Sirius class battleships we were refitting during the Wargame were equipped with them, and even the more modern Cleopatras don’t have anything smaller than sixty two inches.”
“I’d say about two thirds of the ships Home Fleet fought were equipped with hundred year old weapons, then,” Chris replied. “Yet those stealth systems... I’ve never seen anything like them, before. They’re so advanced I can’t even figure out what technology they were based on. They also were better with precision targeting, I think. Emily, in order for a ship to hide in the active sensor shadow of another, how close does it have to be?”
She clucked under her breath as she did the mental math. “Pretty close, depending on the range. Based on what I read of the range the hidden fleet revealed itself from behind those troop carriers, I’d say no more than a hundred yards.”
“A hundred meters distance between hundreds of ships, with no collisions?” Chris mused. “No chance they managed that without some way of sensing where their partner ships were, yet there is no way they could use active sensors without revealing their position. I’d say that’s pretty conclusive, then – there’s a way to see them with passive scans, at least at short range, with sufficiently advanced sensors. Sensors we don’t have and they do, which means their sensors are better than ours. However, while they have all this extremely advanced electronic warfare stuff, there is zero advancement anywhere else. In fact, my guess is this stuff was grafted on to mothballed ships, similar to how we added the shields and modified the particle cannons on board Chihuahua. Only they didn’t bother with corvettes, and went straight to the battleships and heavy cruisers.”
“If that was the case, the ship configurations should be in our database, and we should be able to identify who it was easily,” Rachel pointed out.
“Which just adds to the puzzler, because they aren’t,” Chris mused. “Unless... unless something has been done to them to confuse the computer’s ability to identify them unaided.” He grimaced. “Which means we’ll need to take the images of the attacking warships and compare them – by eye – to every single ship design for the past couple of centuries from every nation in the known universe.” He paused. “The computer might be able to prioritize the list of comparisons for us, but it’ll still take a while. I think we need to ask Yannis to bring lunch with him when he comes by.”
——————————
Chris Desaix stepped on the Chihuahua’s bridge in a capacity other than that of an engineer. He hated that, but the new dynamic that the surprise attack on Earth brought about forced him to accept extra duties. His regular station was the engineering console, but now he needed to accept additional roles.
The reorganization of the watches also re-ordered duty stations. There were now four six-hour watches instead of the three eight hour watches they’d had earlier. Christopher Desaix would now be taking command of one of those watches. Everyone took two shifts a day – usually with rest shifts in between – and his second one would keep him in engineering, but having him in a ‘command’ slot for six hours each day was something he hadn’t ever expected. Chris wasn’t sure what to make of it.
Obviously, Burkhard was at the top of the chain. He took the First Bridge Team, which consisted of Rachel at tactical, Schubert at the helm, and Mumford at communications. That was it. No-one else was needed on the bridge when not at battle stations – not even at the engineer’s station.
Orff would take command for the Second Bridge Team. He had Weber at the helm, Cohen at tactical, and Polk at communications. Mumford was the only person on board who specialized as a Communications Officer, but the members of the logistics team were supposed to cover for her whenever she was off duty.
It was when Rachel took the third shift that things got a little weird. When the crew requirements had been set down, the staff was set for just one layer of redundancy, with no plans made for the possibility of four separate bridge teams. Langer, who was a computer tech nominally attached to both the engineering and tactical sections, wound up not at tactical – as would be expected – but at communications, allowing Mumford to spend her second shift training Polk and a few others to eventually take over the role. Tarbell, the weapons control officer, shifted to tactical, but she’d probably need Rachel to give her some on-the-job training if that became a permanent position. Finally, Schubert stepped up for his second shift – there was no-one else who could take the job outside of he and Weber, and no-one was available to train anyone else. Once there were others available for the tactical position, the hope was that Rachel – who was a qualified pilot in civilian circles but couldn’t fly a military vessel due to her eyes – would be able to let someone else take over her tactical shift with the first team so she could start training new navigators, as Wolf and Weber were too busy with other duties to train them. Eventually, after a three month deployment, it was hoped that crash courses like these would complete the training that they were supposed to be getting in Academy classroom settings... and if they managed to avoid too many combat situations, that might be possible. Of course, as they were heading into potentially hostile space, so that relatively peaceful cruise did not look very likely.
Then there was the fourth bridge team, which Chris was in charge of. In terms of where he was listed in the chain of command, there were three other people whose rank entitled them to take command ahead of Chris. Lt. Commander Emily Mumford, who was too busy training her replacement to take on a shift, was one. Lt. Commander June Ehrlich was another, but her rank was largely an honorary one, and she was incapable of running a watch. Finally, there was Chris’ superior in engineering, Lieutenant Rappaport, who probably should have been promoted to Lt. Commander when the Academy promotions were converted over.
Chris had expected Rappaport to take the watch command, so when it went to him he was shocked. When he protested the assignment, asking Burkhard the reason he had given the fourth watch, all that he got as a reply was a cryptic, “Don’t think we’ve stopped evaluating students just because the Wargame was cancelled.”
It wasn’t until he received the crew assignments for his watch that he understood. His ‘tactical officer’ wasn’t a commissioned officer at all – it was Petty Officer Jonathan Rosebaugh. In other words, while sitting at officer of the watch, Chris would have to teach the tactical position to someone who had zero practical competence in the field... and, in the process, demonstrate his own competence or lack thereof. Considering the way everyo
ne had just ‘graduated’ from the Academy, this was, perhaps, a ‘final exam’ for his tactical prowess.
He was quite glad to have Weber at the helm for her second shift, although he would have preferred Schubert for the simple reason that they had known each other that much longer. He also had another effective specialist for his bridge crew: Once working as a dispatch officer for the Army, Corporal Deborah Culp (who had, like Beccera, been given a ‘temporary’ Naval rank of Petty Officer first class) was probably more qualified to operate communications than anyone but Emily Mumford. At least she knew the equipment, even if she did have trouble translating the Army vernacular she was used to into Navy vernacular.
Chris had been dreading this first watch, so he was rather surprised – and quite a bit relieved – to see Burkhard waiting for him when he and his watch crew arrived. “Are you coming to take the watch off my hands, after all, sir?” Chris asked, only half jokingly.
“It’s your first duty watch,” Burkhard replied. “I figured you might need a little orientation.”
Chris winced slightly. “Well, I have to admit I’m not entirely clear on my job, here. From the description, it mostly my job to ensure that the people who need to stay awake are still awake.”
A slight lip twitch told Chris that Burkhard had similar thoughts, sometimes. “Yes, that’s pretty much the job of the watch lead. There are a few... details, however, which that description leaves out.”
“Such as?” Chris prompted.
“There are always minor decisions that need to be made, usually routine stuff. Your job will be to decide if it’s something that requires alerting me, or if it’s something you can handle on your own. For example, the flagship calls and says we’re out of formation – we’ve been running too fast, for one reason or another, and need to reposition ourselves. Do you need to call me to the bridge, or can you make that judgment yourself?”