by Myke Cole
Still, she couldn’t allow even borderline insubordination. Don’t jump down her throat. That isn’t going to work with her. You want to bring her around, you’re going to have to meet her where she is. She doesn’t get how important this training is. She’s a racehorse set to pulling kids in a wagon. She wants to be out in the world doing the real thing.
Her conversation with Ho pricked at the back of her mind. They don’t understand why this is important. They don’t understand why I’m leaning on them. Why it matters. I have to get them back doing the job. She thought of Ho’s warning that Admiral Allen wouldn’t like her plan. Fuck it, he’s not the one who has to make sure they win Boarding Action.
Oliver relaxed her posture with an effort, leaned back in her chair, made a great show of thinking about Pervez’ comment. The crew sat around the table, forks frozen half way to their mouths, waiting for her reaction. Oliver let the moment drag out, then brightened, tapping her chin. “You know what? You’re right, Petty Officer Pervez. You’re absolutely, one thousand percent right.”
Whatever Pervez had expected, it surely wasn’t this. “I am?”
“She is?” Chief echoed, his eyebrows doing their damnedest to meet in the center of his forehead.
“Yes. Pervez has identified the problem perfectly; that is you’ve lost touch with the mission, just like you said. In a simulator, training for a contest, the stakes aren’t high enough. You need to be out there doing the real thing.”
“But it’s Boarding Action, ma’am,” Okonkwo said, “The reputation of our service is at stake. There’s millions of people watching on TV. That’s pretty high stakes.”
“Look, if we’re going to win this thing, we’re going to win it because we are the absolute best at what we do, stem to stern. Training is only going to take us so far, we have to get it right each and every time. The regs, the operational details, the results. It all has to be absolutely on point. And that means we have to be able to react to the unpredictable environment of real operations. So, Pervez is right. We need to get back in touch with the mission. The real mission. We’re going to get good at this thing by doing the job, every day. We’re going to run radio calls starting now.”
“The stakes are higher running radio calls?” Pervez asked in disbelief.
“You’re goddamn right they are,” Oliver answered. “Radio calls mean lives. You fuck up at Boarding Action and we grit our teeth and say ‘we’ll get ’em next year.’ You fuck up on a radio call and someone dies. So, yes, Petty Officer Pervez, you are absolutely right. I haven’t been taking my own advice and I mean to start, effective immediately.”
She pushed back from the table. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“Where are you going?” Okonkwo asked.
“To talk to the ops boss,” Oliver said. “I want SAR-1 on alert status starting now. Finish up your chow and start gear checks. I’ll meet you in the ready room.”
She turned and walked out, conscious first of the heads of her own crew, and then those of the entire DFAC swiveling to track her movement. She heard another chair scrape back and knew it was Ho even before her XO fell into step beside her as she exited the DFAC and paced down the hall toward the airlock that would connect them to the ladderwell leading up to the ops floor. Out of tradition, grit, or a desire to sympathize with operational units, the ops section was never in spin gravity, and Oliver was steeling herself for the stomach-lurching shift when Ho finally spoke. “So,” he sounded worried, “we’re really doing this. You know this isn’t just a normal Boarding Action. You know what’s at stake here–”
“I know that,” she cut him off. “Don’t think I’d forget that for a minute. I know this is important and I know why they asked me to do this. And I’m doing it, OK?”
“OK,” Ho breathed as the airlock cycled and Oliver felt her stomach rise. She pushed off, letting the drifting sensation take her, launching herself up the ladderwell, tapping the rungs only when she felt her momentum begin to spend itself, climbing with her eyes closed as if she were surfacing from the bottom of some hidden water.
The ops boss simply nodded as she relayed her orders. A magnetized board was bolted to the bulkhead just to the left of the control tower’s massive quartz-glass windows. He went immediately to what looked to Oliver like a bewildering array of magnets on a board beside it, and instantly selected one in the shape of a longhorn that read “SAR-1.” Oliver watched in frank awe. If she’d had an hour to dig through all of the magnets, she’d never have found it.
He then turned and slapped the magnet in the box labeled “ALERT STATUS,” turned to her and said, “Let me know when your people are ready to launch, ma’am.”
“They’re ready now,” she said with a conviction she didn’t feel. Please don’t make a liar out of me.
When she reached the bottom of the ladderwell, however, Ho plucked at her elbow, glancing down at the screen on his wrist. “Uh, boss. You’ve got a call.”
“Is it Alice? I’ll talk to her after…”
Ho looked up. “It’s ops.”
“Ops?” She turned back to the ladderwell. “He could have just come down and got me.”
“No. Big ops. Admiral Allen.”
Oliver blinked. “Oh.”
“I’ll send it to your stateroom,” Ho said, tapping at his wrist. “You want me there?”
“Thanks, but no. Go make sure the crew is hopping to. I’m also going to chat with him about Fullweiler. See if I can’t get some movement there.”
“Could be a long call,” Ho said.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Oliver smiled and headed for her door.
She paused as it shut behind her, taking in the view through the massive window looking out over the Sea of Rains. The sight of the empty blackness cooled her, and she realized she’d been running hot, consumed with worry and almost never alone since the moment Elias had walked into the BMF at Yorktown. She took a second to draw in a breath, let it out. She looked at her reflection in the quartz-glass – the strong line of her jaw, her broad shoulders and straight spine. The silver thread of her admiral’s stars glinted from her lapels. This is a rough ride, for sure. But you are on the back of this horse and your hands are on the reins.
She nodded to her reflection, and picked up the receiver. “SPACETACLET actual.”
“Jane, hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.” Allen’s voice clearly indicated that he didn’t give a flying fuck when he’d caught her.
“No, sir. Just about to head to the ready room for the next phase of SAR-1’s training.”
“That’s what I’m calling about. I’ve got your control logs here and I see the team’s been assigned to duty crew.”
“Wow, sir. That’s… fast.”
Allen didn’t sound amused. “Jane, I run ops for this service. I see the ops control data from every operational command in the fleet.”
And you have time to consider them all? Oliver didn’t ask. Maybe she’d just gotten lucky, or maybe Allen had singled her out for special scrutiny. It didn’t matter either way.
“OK, sir. Well, yes. I’m going to have SAR-1 run radio calls for now.”
“Out of the simulator.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Out of training.”
“Sir, I’d argue this is the most effective training they could possibly be doing.”
Allen sighed, and Oliver could hear the dull scrape of him rubbing a hand across the stubble of his head. “Jane, you were sent to Pico to prep this team to win Boarding Action. That’s literally the reason you’re there.”
“Yes, sir. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
“How does not training your crew for the upcoming contest prepare them to win the upcoming contest?”
“SAR-1 doesn’t have a skill problem, sir. They’ve got a morale problem. Individually, they are clearly the most competent operators I’ve seen possibly in my entire career. But they aren’t gelling as a team because they are still messed up over Lacus
Doloris. These are hard operators, sir. These are people who joined the guard to do the job, and we have to let them do it and do it together, or they are never going to come together as a cohesive unit with the capacity to win this thing. You were there when I made my speech, sir. I meant it. We have to recommit to our jobs if we’re ever going to get past Lacus Doloris. We have to remember why we’re here. And we’re not here to win a goddamn game show, no matter how high the stakes might be this particular time around.”
“Jane, this doesn’t make sense.”
“No, sir. It’s counterintuitive, but it makes absolute and perfect sense. You sent me out here to do a job, and with respect you now have to get the hell out of my way and let me do it. It’s my call to make, and it’s the right call. I’ve seen them train, I’ve run a ops evolution with them. I know what’s happening here and I know how to fix it.”
“I could order you to rewrite that training plan, damnit.”
“No, sir. But you can send me back to Earth and find someone else to do the job your way if you want. I will submit my resignation if that’s what you’re asking for. No harm, no foul.” The words made her stomach churn. If Allen took her up on it and actually sent her back to Earth… Her daughter’s face filled her mind, accompanied by Ho’s words – she seems adrift, ma’am.
Allen was quiet for a long time. “Jesus Christ, Jane. You’ve got my balls in a vise here. You know damn well I don’t have time to find someone else to finish this thing.”
Oliver breathed an internal sigh of relief. “Do you expect me to feel bad about that, sir? You brought me out here to do this my way, and that means you either trust my judgment or you don’t. If you do, then I’ll get back to my ready room and get this team moving on radio calls. If not, you have my resignation, and you have whomever replaces me put them back in the simulator. But I can promise you this: if they stay in a simulated environment, they will lose this thing. We all know MARSOC16 is going to go all the way again this year, and the reason they’re going to do that is not because they outmatch SAR-1 in any individual skill. McGrath is every bit as good a gunner as Abadi, and Pervez could fly rings around Fujimori in a small boat. But the marines love each other. They trust each other. And that is why they’re winning out there, sir. I’ve got less than two months to build that same family here. And it’s only going to get built one way.”
Allen was quiet again for a long time. “You’d better be right.”
Oliver shrugged before remembering that Allen was on the other end of a phone line and couldn’t see her. “Either I am or I’m not. We won’t have to wait long to find out either way.”
“OK, well…”
“One more thing, sir, so long as I have you on the line.”
She could almost hear Allen blinking in shock at the other end. “You are about to ask me for something…?”
“Sure am, sir. If that’s OK.”
“I can’t believe this,” Allen said. “It’s like I work for you.”
Oliver laughed. “It’s Fullweiler, sir.”
“Full… Captain Fullweiler?”
“Yes, sir. The training pipeline at OTRACEN is poisoned. It’s lousy with marines and worse, Marine Corps culture. They are using our school to turn out shooters prepped and ready for close-combat missions, not for SAR runs. That’s a systemic, deckplate level problem, and it needs to be fixed.”
“What does this have to do with Fullweiler?”
“It’s his ship, sir. And he’s running it into the ground. He needs to be relieved. You saw how he reacted to that collision.”
“I know, Jane, but he obeyed orders. It’s hardly cause for such a drastic step. Let me guess, you have a specific replacement in mind?”
“No, sir, I do not. The only person I’d trust with the job apart from myself is Commander Ho, and he’s busy right now. But it does need to be an actual coastie and not a wannabe marine. Someone who is onboard with the old man’s vision for what we’re trying to do out here.”
Allen took a shuddering breath, and still failed to keep the anger out of his voice. “You are way out of your lane here, Jane. You are already trying my patience with your training methods, and now you want jurisdiction over our training pipeline which, you will recall, Captain Elias strenuously advised you not to enter. I said earlier in this conversation that you were sent to Pico for one reason, and that is to make sure SAR-1 goes the distance and–”
“No, sir. I was sent to Pico to help the old man in a broader effort to stop the Navy from dragging us into a war. Boarding Action is just a piece of that. Our training pipeline has cancer, sir. And in my experience, unless you cut cancer out, it spreads.”
“Jane, that is enough. You are dangerously close to making me question your judgment to the point where I take you up on your offer of resignation and damn the consequences. You’ve said your piece and I’ve heard it and we are done with this conversation. Is that clear?”
She swallowed her anger with an effort. “Crystal clear, sir. Thank you for hearing me out.”
“Ops out,” Allen said, and cut the call.
Oliver sat for a long moment looking out the window, willing the sight of her reflection to instill some of the confidence back into her, but it was as if it were a resource she had spent to the last on that phone call. The reflection that had looked so competent before seemed old now, drained, the shoulders hunched. The tiniest hint of a paunch, that Jane had fought so hard to keep off with such success so late in her life was finally succumbing to the hints of age, beginning to show through the tightness of her uniform. She knew the worst thing a commander could do was waffle in the middle of a decision, but it was also true that the call had rattled her. Allen had at least as much experience as her. His opinion wasn’t to be dismissed lightly. No, she thought firmly. He’s not here with these people. He’s not seeing what I see.
The thought was followed by another, which made her heart jerk in her chest. If Tom were here, I could run it by him. He would have been the sounding board for my instincts. Alice had good judgment, and so did Ho, but Ho was a subordinate and Alice had no military experience. Tom had always been the perfect person to talk these things through. She saw the family picture in her peripheral vision, deliberately avoided looking at it. She didn’t need that right now. Not when she had to walk back into the ready room and face her team.
By the time she got back down to the ready room, she was relieved to see that the crew hadn’t made a liar out of her after all. They were already in their bunny suits, their hardshells unpacked and arrayed on the floor before them to make them quicker to don when the alarm sounded.
Ho glanced up at her. “How’d it go?”
Oliver did her best to look unconcerned. “Well enough. We’re good. I take it I didn’t miss an alarm?”
“Not yet, ma’am,” Okonkwo said. She heard the excitement in his voice and felt her confidence perk up a little.
“Good. You all ready to save some lives?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” the team answered in one voice, and she liked the look she saw on their faces. There was some excitement in those eyes as they checked over their gear again. This was the right move, no matter how pissed off Allen is. This is what they needed.
Oliver and Ho went to their own lockers, hurriedly donning their underlayers and bunny-suits, moving through gear checks to make sure they were ready, all the time casting nervous glances over their shoulders at the red klaxon attached to the ready room’s ceiling, the monitor beneath, where they’d watched the video of the MARSOC16 team’s winning evolution, now reeling out alarm calls.
She stared at it now that she was ready, feeling the adrenaline fade as the alarms scrolled by and were assigned to closer boats, those already out on patrol. After fifteen minutes, she heard the dull scraping of a chair as Ho took a seat. Well, what did you expect? That something would blow up immediately? She realized with a start that she did. You’ve been in the business long enough to know that’s not how this works.
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br /> They were well staffed with a lot of boats on regular patrol, but surely something would exceed the usual capability eventually and they’d get scrambled. After another few minutes Oliver began to feel ridiculous, and took her seat at the same broad plastic table as Ho, busying herself with the training terminal there.
By the time the team had returned from the noon meal, the mood had stabilized, but SAR-1 was quiet. Chief kept them as busy as he could with desk-bound coursework, doing PQS sign-offs for boat specs, firearms handling, and space-borne hazards to navigation. The long lunar day dragged on, the sun bright enough outside to make them squint even against the glass’ glare dampeners. The thermal collector-shields and solar panels spread over every available surface made the view below them look like glinting lake.
It had dragged on toward the evening meal when Chief finally sat down beside her. “Ma’am, could I have a wo… contubernium, sorry.”
“You got it, Chief. What’s up?”
“Ma’am, we’re just starting the lunar day on this side of the Moon. It’s got to be around 250 degrees out there.”
“So? We live in an age of modern marvels. We can tackle that heat.”
“Sure, but tackling that heat means burning more fuel and taking on more risk. It means traffic is going to be way down.”
Oliver glanced back out the window. In the distance, she could still make out the occasional blinking of a vessel’s running light, the pale-blue flare of thrusters firing. There was traffic out there. And where there was traffic, there would be an alarm. “People are out there.”
“I know it, ma’am. I just… I wonder if we’re going to learn anything by sitting here and waiting for the SAR alarm to sound. We don’t want to waste time.”
“We’re not wasting time. We’re training. We’re learning patience. We’re are learning to adapt to the mission, rather than the other way around. Right now, the mission means sitting around waiting for the flag to go up.”
Chief cast a glance over his shoulder at the rest of the crew, who studiously avoided eye contact, heads bent on their training terminals. “OK, ma’am. If you say so.”