Rebellion at Ailon

by T J Mott

  “I expect you to learn.”

  She hated these games. She balled her fists up by her sides. “Learn what?!” she demanded.

  He smiled tightly, an expression that only increased her agitation. “You can never know everything. Even your most careful and thoughtful plans will never survive initial contact with the enemy.”

  She half-sighed, half-growled in frustration.

  “I want a full report and analysis from you by the end of the week,” he said formally. “I’ll expect you to summarize that report at the squadron debrief after Flight Two finishes running the exercise. Dismissed.”

  Chapter 32

  Commodore Reynolds looked up in annoyance as his office door opened and Commodore Cooper entered. The Gray Fleet commander was grinning broadly, amused about something, as always. “I heard your Hyberian Raider’s ego took a severe bruising,” he said as he sat down on the other side of the desk. “Which she really, really needed. It’s just not right that a fresh Lieutenant Commander thinks she can keep on barging into the offices of multiple Commodores and get what she wants every time.”

  Reynolds sighed. He was busy and didn’t want to be disturbed, as indicated by his closed office door. He still hadn’t selected a Blue Fleet executive officer, meaning his workload was piling up quickly. “She’s quite upset with me for that,” Reynolds said. “Even though I had nothing to do with it, although I haven’t told her that yet.”

  “Hey, I had nothing to do with it, either,” Cooper responded. “We’re pretty loose around here, and some of my captains and some of your captains did that on their own initiative. I guess they wanted a chance to sucker-punch a Hyberian. I’m not going to punish my men for it, not this time, but I did order them not to interfere with Ghost Squadron’s training again.” Cooper sat down in one of the chairs across from Reynolds’ desk. “How did the squadron debrief go? I couldn’t make it.”

  “Poulsen was pretty hard on herself, and she publicly rebuked herself in a way that was bad for her unit’s morale. But her analysis was essentially correct. Her fatal error was believing she knew everything about the skirmish, since she’d arranged for everything—including the OPFOR—herself. Your two extra ships caused her to misjudge the entire scenario. She then made the mistake of shutting down her sim-link and forfeiting her command unit. And without their commander, the remainder of the flight was too inexperienced to continue operating as a unit.”

  “I see. And did she learn anything?”

  “She had some ideas for improvement,” Reynolds answered. “But she needs to learn some tact. The way she addressed their actions after she forfeited her ship sounded like an indictment, although I don’t believe she meant it that way.”

  “Very green unit, very green commander,” Cooper stated. “I still think you’re pushing her too quickly. She really would have benefited from some time in a lesser command role aboard a larger starship. Maybe in tactics, as a department head or something.”

  Reynolds shook his head. He’d learned a lot about her during their travels together after the Caracal’s destruction, where he’d become convinced that she ultimately belonged in a command role. But she was also very stubborn in some ways, and he’d foreseen very few ways to shift her into command without burning her out. “She never would have lasted. She wants to pilot, and I think she’d leave the fleet rather than accept a transfer away from that. With ships this small, she can be in a command role and still occasionally serve as pilot.”

  “I understand her squadron was split into two flights and ran separate exercises. How did the other one go?”

  “It was much more straightforward,” Reynolds replied, wishing Cooper would leave him alone and just read the reports instead. “Vacek had not helped coordinate the opposing force. He saw the two unexpected ships and rightly assumed something changed after the mission briefing. Where he felt he went wrong, though, was that he approached it like a game. He knew his flight couldn’t win, but he committed his force anyway. Even though they would lose—and they did lose, badly—he knew it was only a skirmish. He thought it would be a waste to spend days traveling in hyperspace only to flee from a mere simulated battle. But in hindsight, he thinks he should have scanned everything and then retreated in order to have passed the mission.”

  “An interesting perspective,” Cooper said. “I can see both sides. I probably would have hyperspaced away when I saw how outnumbered I was. Then I’d have commed the OPFOR over phi-band and explained the reason for the retreat, and set up a skirmish anyways.”

  Reynolds nodded. “And that was what Captain Laraby hoped for. After a Ghost Squadron retreat, he wanted to shift some ships to an observer role only. Ghost Squadron could have gained some valuable skirmish time against a more-balanced force.”

  “Well,” Cooper said, “you and I and Laraby are used to arranging friendly ad-hoc skirmishes. Poulsen is not. Not yet, anyways.”

  Reynolds nodded in agreement. “She still doesn’t quite think like a commander. Tactically, she does well, and in the simulators she’s proven herself very astute when given straightforward scenarios. But she doesn’t trust herself when things go awry. She still thinks that there are well-defined, pre-determined right and wrong answers to every scenario, and that whenever things don’t follow the plan she can come to me and I’ll tell her exactly what to do.” He frowned. “The question is, how to break her of that without breaking her will to improve herself.”

  “You’re afraid she’ll give up at some point?”

  Reynolds pressed his lips tightly together as he thought. “I see this going one of two ways. Either she finds her self-confidence and becomes one of the best squadron commanders in the Organization. Or she loses all faith in herself, gives up command, and I have to waste her potential by returning her to a mere piloting role somewhere.”

  “What about option three?” Cooper asked after a short pause. “You said she works well in straightforward scenarios. Make her a squadron commander, but don’t give her independent missions. Make her subordinate in a larger group. You know, the normal way of training up new commanders.”

  Reynolds shook his head. “That would be settling for mere mediocrity. And I worry she’d be comfortable with that. She’s a dangerous mix of pride and self-doubt right now. Deep down inside, she still wants to prove herself worthy of the Hyberian Raiders, and I believe she even has the potential to do that if she’s pushed hard enough. But she’ll never get there if she thinks she can settle for less.”

  “So what you mean is that you’d rather fail her than let her pass with a less-than-perfect grade?”

  Reynolds frowned. “It sounds bad when you state it that way,” he retorted. “But essentially…yes. If I set the bar high, she’ll jump high. She’s more capable than she realizes.”

  “Why push her so hard? What’s in it for you?”

  Reynolds chewed on his lower lip for a moment and reflected on his own life. “I spent most of my entire adult life in the Keide Defense Force, where I settled for mere mediocrity. I suppose that I’d hate to see anyone else not live up to their potential and come to regret it several decades later. And, I suppose, I want to prove that I can train a worthy replacement for myself. One who will surpass me.”

  Cooper’s mouth slowly expanded into a wide grin. “I can see right through you.” Reynolds made a face, one somewhere between annoyance and confusion. “You were career star navy. For your entire life, you hardly ever got to see your own family, and now you regret it. What’s going on here is that you have fatherly affections for Amanda Poulsen and you’re treating her like an adopted daughter. And what you really want is for her to make you feel like a proud father.”

  Reynolds blinked a couple times in surprise. He’d never even considered that angle…although he quickly realized there was some truth in it. He hardly even knew his own children or grandchildren anymore.

  Cooper stood, and Reynolds was about to ask why he was actually there. He wasn’t one to drop by and shoot the bre
eze. But then Cooper interrupted him, seemingly reading his mind. “And before you accuse me of having an ulterior motive to this visit…here it is.” He reached over the desk and awkwardly worked the upside-down touchscreen controls from his side. A moment later, a message from a high-priority courier channel displayed itself on the table. “Urgent message from Marcell on Ailon, fresh off the latest courier dump. I’ll let you handle it, since you have actual warships in your command and all that.”

  ***

  Poulsen sat in the pilot’s seat in one of Ghost Squadron’s gunship simulator modules, watching the hyperspace timer count down towards zero. Somewhere a speaker clicked loudly, poorly mimicking the characteristic clunk that a real hyperdrive made when it deactivated.

  Her displays sprang to life. Her eyes flicked to the sensor screen, quickly picking out an unidentified contact that she already knew to be her target. She twisted the flight stick over hard and the nimble gunship responded immediately, firing its maneuvering thrusters to yaw the vessel over. Pointing the nose of her gunship almost directly at the contact, she shoved the throttle lever forward. The main thrusters opened up, directly piping the fusion reactor’s plasma exhaust into space at near-lightspeed to propel the ship forward. Her rate of acceleration began to increase as the reactor itself throttled up.

  Something dinged and she looked to her tactical display. It had finally placed the sensor contact on the map and labeled it as a Swift-class fast frigate, designated the Lynx, stopped nearly three hundred kilometers ahead of her. Once again, out of habit, she looked up and tried to see through the windows. But the simulator module, although laid out very similarly to the actual bridge of a gunship, had no windows, and she briefly found herself staring at the empty wall at the room’s front.

  She could have switched over to visual sensors to see a simulated camera feed, but she was flying the gunship solo. She had basic access to most of the gunship’s systems, but without dedicated officers crewing each station she’d never be able to use the gunship to its full extent. There was almost no practical reason to fly a simulator exercise by herself, but she didn’t feel like having any crewmates right now. She needed time away from other people to deal with all the frustration she’d built up after their disasterous skirmish.

  She eased the throttle back as she reached her desired velocity, and then cut the main thrusters. The reactor went to idle. Then she carefully tweaked the flight stick, pointing her nose straight at the frigate.

  Her gunships had stealth packages. At her current range, she was nearly undetectable to the Lynx as long as she managed her EM emissions. Keeping the still-hot thrusters shut down and pointing away from the frigate accomplished that easily for the infrared band. Her sensors were in passive mode, reading the natural spectrum of the battlefield without contributing to it. And her jump into the engagement zone had been intentionally very short, allowing her to store the hyperdrive’s heat in the ship’s heat tanks and leave the radiators and cooling systems offline for the time being, because they glowed like beacons on infrared when active.

  The stealth coating on the gunship’s armor was hard to see in most EM bands. Her ship was technically detectable by her opponent, but at the gain levels needed to resolve its return, the sensor screens would be filled with shot noise. An idling Lancer gunship would look like just another blip of static among thousands.

  The Lynx had definitely seen the phi-band flash from her nearby hyperspace exit, though. Her sensors lit up as the frigate began a high-powered active sensor sweep in her general direction, looking like a brilliant beacon in the middle of nowhere on her sensor screens as it blasted the area with electromagnetic pulses in multiple bands and watched for reflections.

  The beams were tightly-focused and not quite aimed at her. Her opponent couldn’t see her. At best, she thought, her gunship might look like a large speck of interstellar dust on her opponent’s sensors. She wished that would have happened during their actual skirmish, but the comm channel between her gunships had made the vessels quite detectable. It could be some time before her crews were skilled enough to cooperate and anticipate each other while observing comm silence.

  Her gunship continued to close in, and she took a moment to configure a weapons screen. She’d never be able to place precision fire against her target, not while also piloting and monitoring sensors and watching the engineering screens, but she didn’t care. She was frustrated, and the best way to relax herself was to go flying and shoot at stuff.

  Acquiring a target lock was beyond simple because of the Lynx’s active sensor emissions. But she had no subsystem targeting. Only a dedicated gunner with an undivided attention could make the turret adjustments needed to fire upon specific portions of the target. At best, her turrets would fire somewhat randomly along the target’s hull.

  Which meant she needed to position her gunship somewhere that would increase the odds of hitting something important. Like the frigate’s fragile main thrusters.

  Her gunship continued to coast, cruising on inertia only. But her vector wasn’t quite where she wanted it. She needed to pass behind the frigate in order to line up her shot, and that meant risking a maneuver. She momentarily tapped the gunship’s lateral maneuvering thrusters, quickly slewing her vector towards the frigate’s aft.

  But that was enough. Even a few milliseconds worth of superheated plasma exhaust from the thrusters was enough for her quarry to spot her. The frigate immediately opened fire, focusing several of its lasers on her position. Her damage control display flashed, indicating hits, but without a dedicated damage control officer to interpret the results for her, she just didn’t have enough concentration available to see how serious the damage was.

  And the attack immediately ceased. She’d been visible on their sensors for only the tiniest fraction of a second, not long enough for them to plot her course. The enemy weapons fell silent as they lost track of her.

  Now her gunship was nearly there. Focusing on her displays and mentally plotting out a course correction, she prepared her next maneuver. A brief look at her engineering status showed that the hyperdrive was charged and ready with just enough energy to jump her fifty thousand light-seconds away—more than enough to quickly leave the engagement if her attack succeeded.

  Releasing her breath, suddenly realizing that she’d been holding it, she reactivated her maneuvering systems and took control of the flight stick, yawing the gunship and turning the nose so it would face where the Lynx would be in a few seconds, leaving the gunship coasting sideways on its original vector.

  But her maneuver had required another burst from her thrusters, making her visible again. The Lynx opened fire, and beam after beam lanced out at her. She opened up her lateral maneuvering thrusters again—at full power. Her gunship rapidly slowed down, virtually skidding to a stop right where she wanted it.

  Directly behind the frigate.

  The frigate’s main thrusters lit up as it realized what she was attempting to do, but she’d already activated the gunship’s two turrets, enabling their target auto-tracking features. She fired. Her own laser beams flashed forward, striking the frigate’s aft sections at random but hitting a thruster just as often as not by chance. She throttled up her main thrusters, easily keeping up with the frigate as it tried to run, ignoring the warnings that began flashing as she ran her own lasers well into overheat territory.

  She risked taking a second to switch to the engineering display and toggle her radiators. The latest Lancer design tied the laser turrets straight into the main cooling loops, the same high-capacity ones that cooled the hyperdrive, which allowed it to carry far more powerful lasers than most ships its size. But the downside to that was she needed to extend the radiators and activate the cooling system to keep the lasers from melting down at higher duty cycles. Normally, extending radiators during a battle was a death sentence, but she was currently outside her enemy’s firing arcs and a Lancer was far more maneuverable than a Swift.

  The simulated frigate’s
AI soon realized it couldn’t outrun her and tried to turn to port to bring its weapons to bear. But right then, one of its starboard thrusters failed—strangely, far too quickly for it to balance the remaining main thrusters in time. The port thrusters, still operating near full throttle, put a sudden torque on the vessel, and a heartbeat later the frigate was flying through space while rotating around its Z axis at a thousand RPM.

  Must be a bug in the simulator. I’m sure its computers aren’t nearly as fast a real starship’s.

  Poulsen kept up her fire. Though the Lynx’s artificial gravity system could counteract the rotational forces and prevent it from killing its crew, its weapons couldn’t even begin to track her. She saw it fire its maneuvering thrusters to slow down the rotation, but they were far weaker than the main thrusters and it would take it several minutes to stop spinning.

  Several minutes in space combat was an eternity.

  Her comm chimed. “Poulsen,” she answered absentmindedly, killing her velocity relative to the frigate. As it continued spinning, she had plenty of time time to bring up the full WSO suite on one of her displays.

  “Nolon here. Commodore Reynolds has summoned you and Vacek. He’s in his office in the ops building.”

  She frowned. “Copy, I’ll be there shortly.” At least her simulation was nearly finished. It would take a screwup of unbelievable proportions for a warship—even a lone gunship crewed by a single officer—to lose a battle against a simulated frigate with a questionable AI in an uncontrolled high-rate spin.

  The Lancer-class gunships had two forward-facing missile tubes that could be loaded with a variety of warheads or other equipment, and for this mission she’d selected a pair of low-yield fusion warheads. Normally, missiles rarely came into play during starship combat. They were slow and highly visible to sensors, easily evaded or shot down in flight.