A scenario in which our mighty Valkyrie survived the battle but lost all power, and we somehow had plenty of time for the Dutchman to jump in and hook onto us without being shot at, had our crew rolling their eyes and calling bullshit.
I agreed it was unlikely.
Why did we practice scenarios that were so unlikely?
It’s simple: Apollo 13.
During that mission to the Moon, the module the astronauts lived in lost all power on the way to the moon, forcing them to survive in the lunar lander. NASA engineers did not have a playbook for dealing with complete loss of power, because that scenario was considered too unrealistic.
The Universe loves screwing with monkeys.
Also, there is Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
In the military, we have a saying. It’s more of a mantra, something so ingrained we don’t have to think about it.
We train the way we fight.
It’s simple: if we plan to use Kristang rifles in silent sniper mode during the actual mission, the training should use that same type of rifle, in sniper mode. Ideally, the training should use the same rifles that would be employed during the mission. In training, each person should use the weapons assigned to them, and they were responsible for cleaning and maintaining those weapons. That was something it took Skippy a long time to understand. To him, every rifle was the same, or close enough. And his little helper elfbots would do a much more thorough job of cleaning and maintenance than us clumsy monkeys. At first, because Kristang rifles were almost identical and there were no external serial numbers, our people used bits of tape or markers to identify ‘their’ weapon. When the rifles came back from maintenance with all the markings cleaned off, our special operators had been-
What is a word that means ‘upset’, but with the yield dialed up into the megaton range?
Yeah, that.
When rifles or mech suits or any other gear were assigned, each item had scratches or notches or some other semi-permanent marking, to identify which operator ‘owned’ that gear. We filthy monkeys still could not perform more than the most simple maintenance tasks, but knowing the rifle that came back from the nanobot cleaning bath was the same rifle you had been training with for weeks or months, made a big difference.
Train the way we fight.
That is why, even during attack simulations when Valkyrie was actually drifting in interstellar space, we were strapped into our seats or couches on the bridge, and everyone wore environment suits in case we lost air pressure.
Still, thirty-eight is a lot of times to run scenarios.
Oh, that thirty-eight number? Those were after we ran twenty-seven scenarios that were considered failures.
So, if you ever think ‘It would be great to be one of the Merry Band of Pirates’, think about that. Think about being me, stuck in the command chair, sweat soaking my back despite the cooling gear working overtime. Think about successfully completing an attack simulation, the fourth in a row with only twenty-minute breaks in between. We finish, everyone is exchanging weary high-fives, and then Lt. Colonel Smythe clears his throat from the referee chair at the back of the bridge. “Right,” he says in an accent that makes it sound like he is saying ‘roight’. “That wasn’t too terrible a cock-up. Let’s see if we can’t do that again, but this time, let’s pretend we are professional warriors, hmm?”
I respect Smythe.
I admire him.
Sometimes, I really hate him.
We took a break after the last attack simulations, while our two-ship formation jumped toward the site of our first battle. People had downtime to relax, and one thing we did was rehearse for the play Skippy suggested we perform. In our fabulous production of West Side Story, I was originally supposed to play the part of a Jets gang member named ‘Baby John’. That sucked, so I looked up the names of other characters and told Skippy I wanted to be the gang leader. He shot down that idea, but relented and agreed I could be lesser roles of either ‘Action’ or ‘Big Deal’. That made me happy for a while, until I realized that he had suckered me into playing a background character with hardly any lines.
Well, I got the last laugh, when in my audition, even I had to admit my singing sounded like someone had autotuned a cat fight. Ok, so singing is not my best talent.
My dancing is also not great.
Oh, shut up.
Anyway, because we had a small crew, cast members had to double up and play multiple roles. In a flash of inspiration, Skippy offered me the only two parts that did not have any singing lines. A guy named ‘Doc’ who owned a drugstore, and a cop named ‘Officer Cupcake’. No, his name is Krupke. I kept forgetting that, which drove Skippy crazy.
That’s why I kept doing it.
When I read the script, I saw that Doc was a dull old guy. When I gave Skippy suggestions of more exciting lines for Doc, he shot them down right away. At the first rehearsal, I waited at the side of stage, watching the show until it was my turn. Valkyrie had a real theater, apparently the Maxolhx really enjoy live music or watching each other cough up hairballs or something. The wait was long, because acclaimed Broadway director Skippy kept interrupting the cast to correct their singing or dancing. By the end of an hour, the cast was getting seriously annoyed with our asshole director, and a mutiny was brewing. As captain of the ship, I maybe should have stepped in to smooth things over, because staging a musical production was good for morale. I did not intervene, because instead of bonding over the play, the crew was bonding over their hatred of Skippy’s dictatorial dickness. Bonus, as far as I was concerned.
The mood was ripe for rebellion when I stepped out on stage. Because Doc’s lines in the musical were depressing boring crap, I improvised. Dropping to my knees, I shouted in anguish, shaking my fists at the imaginary sky then pounding my fists on the stage. “Youuu MANIACS! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you to HELL!”
The cast broke into thunderous applause. “Bravo! Encore!” People were cheering.
“What the hell was that?!” Skippy screeched in outrage, flinging his holographic script to the deck in dramatic fashion.
“Thank you,” I bowed to the cast. “Thank you. You are too kind. Skippy, that was the climactic final scene of Planet of the Apes. The original one, with that Moses guy.”
His avatar was literally hopping mad. He stomped on the script with his holographic feet. “That was not in the script!”
“Yes,” I said. “But you have to admit, it was way better.”
“Maybe we should do Planet of the Apes instead of West Side Story, eh?” Frey asked.
“That’s a great idea,” Grudzien agreed immediately.
“We are not doing Planet of the freakin’ Apes!” Skippy was really furious.
“Why not?” Kapoor asked.
Reed stepped forward. “I want to do Planet of the Apes.”
She was followed by a chorus of ‘Me toos’.
Skippy hung his head, face buried in his tiny hands, sobbing. “I hate each and every one of you.”
“Huh,” I crouched down in front of him. “See, if you could bring that level of passion to the production, it would be awesome.”
When he looked up, let’s just say he was not filled with appreciation for my artistic opinion.
That’s how the Merry Band of Pirates put on a musical play based on Planet of the Apes. Naturally, Skippy renamed it Planet of the Monkeys, and he seriously screwed with the script, but we all had a good time.
I think he still hates me for that.
Our attack at Koprahdru was entirely successful, even more than I ever dared to hope. Both enemy destroyers were ripped apart. The missiles we launched had been networked; they talked to each other and to Skippy. If all of our missiles had detonated their warheads on maximum yield, there would have been nothing left of those ships except high-speed debris no larger than a grain of sand. Scorched sand, glowing with short-half-life radiation.
Instead, because we wanted the flight recorder data
of those ships to survive, the missiles had a conversation just before they exploded, coordinating their detonation times and yields to guarantee the ships did not survive, but the flight recorder drones were able to launch with their vital data.
The stunned Bosphuraq in the research base, buried deep under the surface of the airless planet, also recorded their own view of the brief but intense battle. They had to be whooping for joy after seeing the two destroyers blown up by a mystery ship. Especially after that ship transmitted a manifesto stating that the attack had been conducted by the rogue faction of Bosphuraq who had developed advanced technology. The manifesto went on at length, to rail against the dastardly efforts of the cruel Maxolhx to suppress development by their client species, to call on all client species across the galaxy to rise up in solidarity, to warn of further attacks if the Maxolhx continued their unjust genocidal actions against the peaceful Bosphuraq people, to-
Well, if you’ve ever read a manifesto, you won’t find any surprises in the bogus one we transmitted. It was long-winded, rambled aimlessly from one subject to another, kept repeating the same questionable claims, and ignored the numerous war crimes of Bosphuraq society overall and the rogue faction in particular. Basically, it was totally believable as work of self-righteous propaganda, which worked perfectly since Skippy had based it on an actual manifesto from a well-known wacko group of birdbrains.
After the Bosphuraq in the research base finished slapping each other on the back, the smart ones must have realized our destruction of the two Maxolhx ships had only delayed their inevitable demise. The smart ones knew that our one ship, despite our impressive manifesto, could not protect the inhabitants of the base forever. And that the Maxolhx would need to retaliate. Not just retaliate, but hit back in a spectacular way that would send a clear signal to any other ambitious clients who were tempted to try their luck at rebellion.
But, whatever happened there, it was not a problem the Merry Band of Pirates had to worry about.
We quickly followed the Koprahdru action with a second attack, in which we blew a light cruiser to dust and damaged its escorting destroyer, I couldn’t wait to tell Adams all about it. Of course, she did not need me to tell her anything, she had access to watch a data feed from the bridge, and while I was busy assessing damage to our ship and writing notes for the after-action report, Adams had been working with Frey on reading skills. It must have been humiliating, and frustrating to her, having to relearn how to read. No, I got that wrong. That’s not what she was doing. Skippy had explained that her ability to read was largely intact; she could see words and knew what they meant. Her ability to read and comprehend the subject was encouragingly good, Skippy was optimistic about a rapid recovery. What she had trouble with was controlling her hands, and with speaking. Her hands were too weak and uncoordinated to hold a book or a tablet, so Skippy assigned a bot to hold a tablet for her. All she needed to do to turn pages or otherwise control the tablet was use eye-click commands, just like how we used the menus in the displays of our suit visors.
The real problem she faced, the problem that she initially had nanobots helping her with, was associating words and images with speech. She could see the word ‘Apple’ and see a picture of an apple, and knew they meant the same thing. Her trouble was with saying words aloud. Some glitch in her internal wiring prevented her from remembering how to form sounds that were recognizable as ‘a-pp-le’. And other words.
It was funny, and by ‘funny’ I mean odd. When she wanted to say something that was prompted by thoughts generated inside her head, she was pretty good at it. She hesitated a lot, and stuttered, and squinted when she lost her train of thought. But, generally, she got her point across. When she was associating an external word or image with speech, she struggled. That’s what Frey was helping her with. Sure, Adams practiced on her own, she didn’t have much else to do and she was determined to get back to duty as soon as possible. Having another person hold a book and point to words might have been slower than working directly with Skippy, that wasn’t the point. Her recovery was not only physical and mental, it was also emotional. It was important for her to know people cared about her. The more people spent time with her, talking with her, the faster her brain would make new connections. Skippy, for all his awesomeness, could not fully replicate the messiness of real human conversation, where people use slang and interrupt each other and say inane things like ‘uh’ and ‘um’. Adams needed to listen to real people talking, and relearn how to talk like a real person.
It was a work in progress.
Anyway, as soon as I was assured the ship had not sustained any lasting damage from the second battle, I left the bridge and stopped by the galley. Adams was out of her sticky gel tub and in a real bed, even if that bed had a conforming layer of nanogel. The tubes that supplied her with nutrients had been removed, she was supposed to be eating real food again. Doctor Skippy warned that because she had not had any real food for a while, she needed to eat bland things in small portions.
That’s why I got a cup of mashed potatoes, some crackers, and an orange. Plus chocolate, because, chocolate.
“Hey, Gunny,” I was cheery when I knocked on the bulkhead next to the door. “How are you?”
“She’s doing great, Sir,” Frey beamed, snapping the book closed. Then, our Canadian special operator took the hint that my question had not been directed at her, and stood up. “Time for lunch, Gunnery Sergeant?”
“Oh, w-wonderf-ful,” Adams frowned. It wasn’t quite a frown, as the left side of her mouth drooped slackly rather than forming a frown. That bothered her also, she had seen herself in a mirror and knew the left side of her face sagged as if she’d suffered a stroke. In a way, she had. Worse than a stroke. To make it more irritating, it didn’t happen all the time, so she didn’t know it was happening except from the reactions of other people. We all put on our best poker faces around her. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t.
“It is wonderful,” I set the food down on a tray next to the bed. “I mashed these potatoes myself.”
As Frey mumbled a goodbye, Adams painfully pushed herself more upright in the bed, shaking her head when I tried to help her. The gel pad on the bed kept working against her, and she slipped down when she tried to slide up the pillow.
“Skippy, you ass,” I hissed. “Help her.” The gel instantly firmed up and even formed a wave that scooted her upright.
“It’s th-that easy?” She was pissed, and not at me.
“All you have to do is ask,” Skippy protested. “Margaret, you told me that you didn’t want my help.”
“I d-don’t want you d-doing things I should do for myself. That doesn’t m-mean to work against me, y-you-” She pinched up her face in concentration, trying to get the words out. Angrily, she bit her lip and gave Doctor Skippy a single-finger gesture.
Her middle finger was working just fine.
“Shithead?” I offered. “Asshole? I’ve got other suggestions, if you want.”
“I can h-handle my own insults, S-Sir.” She snapped at me, but there was a twinkle in her eyes. Though her neural circuits were damaged, Gunny Adams was still in there.
Dipping a spoon in the potatoes, making sure to get into the pool of melted butter in the center, I held it up for her to see. “Can you handle my awesome mashed potatoes?”
“They l-look like the g-g-grits that R-Reed fed me for breakfast.”
“These are way better. Come on, have a taste. Open up.”
According to Skippy, she had a good appetite, eating everything people brought to her. That didn’t mean she enjoyed being fed. Her first attempt to hold a spoon ended with the contents smeared on her neck and spilled over the bed. She couldn’t control her hands well enough to hold a spoon, and her eye-hand coordination was poor. Her wounded pride didn’t like having to be fed, it also did not like lying in a pool of spilled gravy. “Y-you made those potatoes?” Her eyes narrowed with suspicion.
Ok, not all my culinary experiments
were unqualified successes. “They are delicious. Come on, eat up, and I’ll tell you all about our recent space battle.”
“F-Frey already t-told me.”
“Did she exaggerate my accomplishments to make me look like a hero?”
“N-no.”
“Then clearly she didn’t tell the story right. These taters are getting cold, Gunny.”
“Sir.” She waited to be sure I was paying full attention to her. “I s-swear, if you m-make one ‘Choo-choo’ sound, or p-pretend the spoon is an airplane, I will hurt you.”
“Gunny, come on,” I put on my best hurt expression. “I would never kick a buddy when he’s, I mean, she is, down.”
“Ok,” she allowed her head to rest back into the pillow.
“Besides,” I made the spoon do an artful loop. “I was going for a dropship emergency recovery scene. See? Your mouth is the docking bay.”
“D-dead.” She glared at me. Her face was not drooping at all. “Y-you are a dead man.”
“Mmm,” I ate a mouthful of mashed potatoes, keeping beyond reach of her hands. “Yummy.”
During World War Two, the German U-Boat fleet experienced what they called ‘Die Gluckliche Zeit’, sorry for my terrible pronunciation. It means The Happy Time. From June 1940 to February 1941, the U-Boats were resoundingly winning the Second Battle of the Atlantic, sinking cargo ships faster than they could be replaced, and threatening to cut off Britain’s sea supply line. The tide of the sea battle turned after the Allies implemented convoys, and developments in sonar and radar meant the ocean’s depths were no longer a refuge for diesel-powered submarines.
Valkyrie’s successful attack on the pair of destroyers at Koprahdru began our own Happy Time. For the next two months, we ran wild across Maxolhx territory, striking relatively soft targets with impunity. In case you aren’t familiar with the word ‘impunity’, because I wasn’t, it means to take action without consequences. Or close enough. With our mighty Valkyrie, and with the support of the good old Flying Dutchman, we were kicking ass and taking names across the galaxy. Well, except for the taking names part, I didn’t really want the names of the people aboard the ships we were tearing apart. They were aliens, they were Maxolhx, they would have happily slaughtered us, and they were also soldiers and sailors or whatever the kitties called the military crews who flew their warships. Whenever I saw a ship shattered by our weapons, a little voice in the back of my head reminded me that we had just killed another starship crew. That annoying little voice also told me that while it felt good to kick ass, blowing up random enemy ships was not going to protect Earth.
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 14