The holo changed again, this time showing another large capital ship, this one not meant to stand in the line of battle. The oversized grabber and hyperdrive units indicated that this was a hyper VII vessel, while the numerous hangar hatches revealed its purpose.
“Of course we need the attack wings to go with them,” said Vickers. “As well as trained crew, and Klashek com techs.”
“I know they’re effective,” said Duke Mgonda, frowning. “But I already miss the days when a formation of battleships was the ultimate symbol of power.”
“New age, Duke,” said Sean with the wave of a hand. “I’m sure a lot of the old school officers would rather have battleships than attack carriers. But unless the Cacas can come up with their own Klassekians, I don’t think they’re going to field anything as effective as inertialess attack fighters. I think these are destined to become the backbone of the fleet for now and into the future. Especially if Admiral Chan can work more of her magic on improvements. Which brings us to the last order of business for this meeting. Manpower. Why don’t you start off, Mishori.”
“Yes, your Majesty,” replied the Grand Marshal with a short head bow. “All Imperial Army training facilities are working at full bore. And we have established a number of new camps throughout the core worlds, quadrupling the number of new recruits we can process and train. The two places we are still facing shortages are in armor and heavy weapons systems.”
“Do you have enough training armor?” asked the Emperor.
“We have enough for initial familiarization, and some of that armor is obsolete, if still serviceable.”
“Then we just keep training people and assigning them to light units for planetary defense, until we stockpile enough armor to start building up heavy units,” said Sean.
“And when will we get those heavy armor suits, your Majesty? It seems that the entire pipeline is feeding suits into the Imperial Marines.”
“I’ll look into it,” said Sean, making a note in his log through his implant. “Any other problems?”
“Well, we’re doing well getting officers trained and deployed. We’ve reopened OCS for recruits with degrees, as well as qualified NCOs. But that second source for new officers is having a negative effect on our staffing of non-commissioned officers. As I’m sure your Majesty knows, without good NCOs, the Army grinds to a halt. And every one we promote to lieutenant deprives a unit of a junior leader. We’re working overtime to push people through the NCO academies, and promoting junior NCOs to senior ranks as fast as possible.”
“Again, do the best you can, Mishori,” said the Emperor, nodding. “No one expected that we would have to expand so fast.” And we’re going to have to expand even faster if we’re going to win this thing. Because we’re going to have take them out completely to come out as victors. “Sondra?”
“I guess we’re having similar problems,” said McCullom, looking at Mishori for a moment before returning her attention to her Monarch. “We’re training up spacers as fast as we can, and the addition of more training platforms has helped with more advanced specialty training. Of course, and with no disrespect intended for our planet bound comrades, it just takes much longer to train a technical specialist able to use and repair shipboard systems. The only way we can actually keep our ships running is by taking a percentage of already competent ship’s complements and moving them to new ships, while replacing them with new spacers. It dilutes the competence of the all of our ships, which can affect their combat capabilities.”
Sean nodded. “We need more ships, and we need to crew those ships, so we have to take what measures we must take. And I assume that you are taking pretty much the same measures with trying to get officers and NCOs in place.”
“We are, with much the same consequences. We’re promoting NCOs to the ranks of officers, but since we are already being flooded with brand new ensigns, we’re starting most of them off at lieutenant rank, some at senior grade.”
“What about the merchant marine?” asked Mgonda. “That should be a ready source of trained spacers and officers.”
“Oh, it is,” said McCullom, nodding. “And we have been calling up some of them, as many as we can get away with. But we still have need of the merchant marine to keep the commerce and industry of the Empire running.”
“But the wormhole gates?”
“Duke Taelis,” said McCullom in the tone of one lecturing a student. “We don’t have enough wormhole gates open to cover the entire Empire. While some are in place, and have relieved some of the burden on our shipping resources, there are still not enough to handle the load. We still have core worlds without gates, as well as almost all of the developing worlds.”
Sean nodded, a worried expression on his face. It made him nervous that a third of the core worlds still didn’t have their own ship gates, meaning they couldn’t be reinforced quickly if they were attacked. But there were other places that had great need of gates. Sector headquarters, front strongholds, and now the need for gates to Bolthole and the Nation of New Earth. Again, they could only do what they could do. Wormholes were still a precious resource, ship gates even more so, since they required large quantities of negative matter, which was also a strategic resource with many uses.
“If we’re given enough time, we’ll solve the staffing problems, until the next series of battles,” said McCullom, shrugging her shoulders.
And that was the biggest problem. They lost ships, and in most cases at entailed the loss of most of the crew. So they had to replace both. Sean studied history, and he couldn’t find a point in the prespace history of the human species where there were such horrendous crew losses in proportion to ship losses. There had been battles where ships had gone down with the loss of all but a few survivors. But space battles tended to have high percentages of total losses, fifty percent or more.
“Well,” he finally said in closing the meeting, “we can always hope that we’re given that time. But we can’t count on it.”
Chapter Two
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
Euripides
HYPER VII DESTROYER ANGELA COLLINS: AUGUST 12TH, 1002
“Battle stations. Repeat, all crew to battle stations.”
Petty Officer First Winston Nagawa jumped up from his supine position in his personal rack and hit his head on the ceiling. Luckily the people who had designed such things had thought of the potential for head damage from sitting up quickly in the low racks. It was well padded, but the Spacer still cursed as his head made contact.
I never had to worry about this crap on the Morning Star, thought the former merchant marine engineering mate. On the luxury liner he had served on before being called up, he had been berthed in his own cabin. While it wasn’t the lap of luxury itself, it had given him the room to move around, unlike the one man racks the navy provided.
The cylindrical chamber slid out of the wall, and the noise of the other petty officers getting out of their beds was now audible. The men were jumping out of their beds and heading for their lockers, and Nagawa cursed again as he noted the time on his implant. He had only been in his bed for a little over an hour, after a full shift in engineering. And it’s only a fucking drill, he thought, tapping into the ship’s tactical system to make sure.
“Battle stations,” blared the intercom again.
“Alright, already,” growled the Petty Officer.
“You’re in the Fleet now, pretty boy,” said Petty Officer First Janasa Karpasian, laughing at the former merchant spacer and using the derogatory term of military spacers toward those who served in the civilian sector.
”And on a fucking destroyer,” continued Winston, shaking his head, sealing up his shipboard jumpsuit, then pulling on his boots. He had hoped for a carrier, a nice big ship that stayed away from battle. Or at least a battleship, something that could take a pounding and come out the other side. But tin cans? Tin cans went up with one hit, most times while trying to protect the bigger ships that co
uld handle more.
“Quit complaining, pretty boy,” said Karpasian. “At least you’re not on an antimatter tanker. Now you had best get to your station, or the XO will ream you a new one.”
Winston shook his head and headed out of the common room and into the corridor. He was on the third engineering shift, which placed him on damage control, in his case on the forward party. But his armor was stored in engineering, where he worked. Which meant he had to hurry.
“Nagawa,” yelled a harsh voice when he finally arrived at his station, running in under the eye of the Chief of the Ship, Senior Chief Kongbo. “You’re the last one in. Care to enlighten me on why you are so damned slow.”
“I’m sorry, Senior Chief Kongbo. I had to go to engineering to get my armor.”
“Just like all the other engineering personnel on this team,” growled the bear of a man, looming large in his combat armor. “And they all made it within the drill standard. You are the only one who didn’t.” yelled the Senior Chief, pushing a large armored finger into the Petty Officer’s chest plate. “You better hope this doesn’t come to the attention of the XO, or the Old Man.”
Nagawa found calling an officer who could have been his son the Old Man just a little strange. Lt. Commander Zhukov looked like he had just come out of the academy last year. Captain McIntosh, of the Morning Star, had looked the part of the Old Man. He had been well into his second century, and had spent almost a hundred years in space. Only the intimidating presence of the long term NCO kept him from laughing.
“I don’t have any more time for you, so get to your station.” The Senior Chief turned, saw something else that needed his attention, and was off like a flash, voice bellowing.
“PO Nagawa,” called out another voice from across the room.
Winston looked over the heads of some other armored men who had yet to settle into their seats, to see his own team waiting in their couches by their lockers. He hurried that way, still not used to the medium combat armor that all crewmen wore aboard warships. Merchant spacers also wore armor when necessary, in case of emergencies, but theirs was a much lighter model. While the military model was much stronger, and protected the wearer to a much greater degree, it was also much larger and more massive, and therefore harder to maneuver.
“You ready, PO?” asked the Marine Sergeant that was the team second in command. The other three members of the team were already in their seats, strapped in, eyes closed as they jacked into the system.
“I guess,” said Winston, seating his armored body in his own couch, made to help him withstand any gravity overload that might make it through the inertial compensators while the destroyer maneuvered in combat. He closed his eyes and let his own implant, already linked with the armor’s comp system, link in with the ship’s tactical net.
The net was showing the Angela Collins in three dimensional space, maneuvering along with two other tin cans and a light cruiser, the Scranton. About eleven light minutes away was what the sensors were saying was a heavy cruiser of unknown origin. A generic opponent for this training exercise.
And I could take a long nap in the time it will take for that thing to actually pose a threat, he thought, knowing that the ship’s system would be monitoring him through the exercise, and it wouldn’t look good for him to not be paying attention.
Still, he let his mind wander through the system, to every area that he had access to, which was everything that wasn’t involved with higher level tactical decisions. Everyone aboard was at their stations; the first two engineering shifts watching the power generation and motive functions of the ship, ready to repair or reroute systems as needed. The weapons division manning missile launch, laser and particle beam systems. Environmental systems were monitoring both life support and electromagnetic shields. There were some gaps in the coverage. The ship had a paper strength of thirteen officers and two hundred and sixty enlisted, but it was short one officer and eleven spacers. Ships were expected to function, to fight, with only a quarter of their authorized strength, so missing four percent was not considered a big deal. Still, when things got tight, the extra hands were missed.
“We have missile launch,” came the call over the tactical net. “Ten missiles, accelerating at five thousand gravities. General heading, toward the force. Second launch detected.”
The seat shivered slightly, simulating the shake of the destroyer while launching its own missiles. He hadn’t heard that order, which was probably in response to a command from the Scranton, the light cruiser leading the squadron. That part of the net was above his access level, though the tactical plot wasn’t, and he could see the incoming and outgoing on his occipital lobe.
“Missile impact in twenty-four minutes,” called out the Tactical Officer, the Lieutenant who actually ran the battle for the ship under the commands of the captain.
The ships continued to launch, the enemy cruiser putting over a hundred missiles into space, the squadron returning an equal number. Moments after the last simulated missile left the simulated tubes the voice of the Captain came over the net.
“By order the squadron commander, the simulation will be advanced by twenty minutes.”
Which meant that the enemy missiles would now impact in two minutes. And now they could see where they were targeted. Eighty were heading for the light cruiser, eight for each destroyer. At least that was the enemy plan, but the destroyers had also moved up in their courses as the simulation advanced, and were all now heading at maximum acceleration to put themselves between the missiles and the cruiser.
It’s only a simulation, thought Winston, trying to calm himself down. The simulation was so damned real, it was easy to fall for it. But there weren’t real missiles heading for them, intent on killing anything that got in their way.
The chair shook again, and the tactical plot was showing more icons leaving the ships of the squadron, counter missiles, on headings to attempt intercepts with the incoming weapons. A minute later they started making those intercepts, at least some of them, taking out about a third of the incoming. Moments after that the beam weapons, lasers and particle beams, opened fire, sending out torrents of firepower in an attempt to sweep the remaining missiles away. Twenty-six made it through that wave to come under the attention of auto-weapons. These took out most of the remaining missiles, but oft times at ranges that still flooded ships with waves of heat and radiation.
“We have damage to forward missile room three,” came the call over the damage control net, while a schematic of the ship came up on Winston’s implant, highlighting the route his team was to take to that area. It was not a straightforward path, as other damage had sealed off the direct route. “Missile room three is open to space.”
Winston pulled himself out of his seat and started for the hatchway. Red blinking icons on the schematic showed the casualties in and around that chamber. “Let’s move,” he told his team, trying to figure out the best way to attack the problem.
When he was serving on a liner the main focus had been on getting the passengers off the ship. The Fleet didn’t operate that way. If there was a way to save a ship, they would take just about any risk to do so.
The corridor leading forward was filled with simulated hazards. Smoke in the air, flickering lights, even variations in gravity. Now his experience as a spacer came to the fore, as he maneuvered easily through the obstructions.
The simulated battle was still going on, and they went through the motions of getting the damage to the missile room under control. The hull was self-sealing, the liquid nanometal between the armor layers filling the hole and hardening. Of course that was simulated as well. Winston thought the training was very realistic, and probably something they needed, though he wasn’t sure if they would perform as well in the real thing. And he would prefer that it didn’t occur during his sleep period.
“All crew are released from battle stations,” came the voice of the Captain over the net. “Report to stations for debriefing.”
Winston
sighed as he looked at his men, wondering how long they would have to sit around and be told their shortcomings in this exercise. It didn’t take as long as he had feared, but he was still too wound up to go back to bed, even though his next shift wasn’t for another three hours.
The mess was almost full, as it seemed almost everyone else off duty had the same thought. Winston grabbed a cup of coffee and a Danish and headed for the gym, eating on the way. The ship had a well-equipped gym, with both exercise and recreation equipment. The Fleet took the fitness of its personnel seriously. They had daily organized exercise based on their shift and division, but most also did some workouts on their own. The small Marine detachment had their own gym, and from what he had heard they were all exercise fanatics. Having seen them running the corridors in their t-shirts, he could believe it.
His shift was very uneventful, as to be expected. The ship was brand new, and in top condition. Even if it had been an older vessel, the self-repair systems and nanites kept everything in as good a condition as if it were new. The crew was there to handle the unexpected that still occurred, and of course battle damage.
The PO was looking forward to a quiet sleep period after shift. He took his meal in the mess, showered, then lay in his bed and retracted his cylinder into the wall, cutting him off from all of the noise generated by his roommates. It seemed like he had barely closed his eyes when the voice sounded over the net.
“Battle stations. Battle stations. This is not a drill.”
Winston cursed under his breath at the bastards who were going to interrupt another of his sleep periods. Why can’t they pick on another shift? he thought, pushing down on the panel that moved the cylinder out of the wall. And then the words hit him like a bat to the head. This is not a drill.
* * *
The Fenri ship had accomplished its task, catching the attention of the small warships it had been baited to attract. Now was the time to get away, to lead the ships back to the vessel that could hurt them.
Exodus: Empires at War: Book 10: Search & Destroy Page 5