A moment later, Adam was finished and moving right into the next room, through the pressure barrier. A more experienced officer might have wondered why the barrier was there. They ran into the room…and, a moment later, we heard the sound of retching. The suits hadn’t been fixed properly.
“First lesson,” I said, as they staggered back into the room. The interior of their suits was truly disgusting. “Check everything, even if someone tells you it’s safe. Trust no one when it comes to your personal equipment. Take no chances. It’s not a race, you know. Why did none of you check the telltales on the suits?”
I smiled at their expressions. This time, the experience had been humiliating, but harmless. The next time, it might be lethal…and I could see the realisation sinking in. Despite their inexperience, perhaps there was something that could be made of them.
“Clean yourselves up,” I added, more gently. “We’ll reconvene at Ninth Watch.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The UN prefers not to ‘waste’ money on war games and exercises, insisting instead that it’s Captains – those who believe that training isn’t a waste of time or money, but a vital process – work with computer-generated simulations. This has the effect of allowing mistakes to be made and studied without any real life consequences, but it lacks a certain reality. The situation is worse in the Infantry. Training budgets are so low that infantrymen are rarely allowed to fire their weapons outside of combat…and the paperwork required is so extensive that most officers skip training altogether. The results of this can be imagined.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
“Stand by to open the wormhole,” the Captain ordered. “Helm?”
Ensign Yianni Gerasimos looked nervous – and considerably more demure than she had on her arrival – but somehow also confident. She would have practiced in simulations at the Academy, yet now she was doing it for real. “Wormhole coordinates set, Captain,” she said, carefully. “We are targeted on Botany.”
I checked my own console. I hadn’t realised, back when I’d been an Ensign, how many safety precautions the Captain had had in place. I’d believed that I was solely responsible and anything that went wrong would be my fault. The Captain had had the Pilot and a Lieutenant watching over my electronic shoulder, ready to intervene if I charted a course right into a planet’s atmosphere or somewhere else equally dangerous.
“Good,” the Captain said. “Engineering, this is the Captain. Status of the Jump Drive?”
“Jump Drive inline and ready for operation, Captain,” the Engineer said. I hadn’t realised how involved he’d been either. “You may open the wormhole at will.”
“Excellent,” the Captain said, gravely. “Helm, open the wormhole and take us in.”
My display altered as space warped in front of us, opening up into a wormhole. A person watching from the observation blister would have seen an event horizon forming in front of us, opening up into a funnel that sucked us down out of normal space and time, but my display merely showed the energy flux. It reminded me of what the Senior Chief had said about how few people really understood the Jump Drive, or even how it worked. We were dependent on a piece of technology we barely controlled.
“Wormhole entrance closed, sir,” I reported, as the wormhole sealed itself behind us. The display suggested that we were trapped in our own little universe. In theory, it was possible for another starship to inject itself into our wormhole, but as far as I knew, no one had ever tried. No one expected an attack inside a wormhole. It would require so much luck that no one could hope to pull it off. It was barely possible to track the wormhole vector to get a rough idea of where a starship was headed. Even that wasn’t perfect. A starship could emerge from one wormhole and promptly open a second one, altering heading as it did so. “We’re clear.”
“Good,” the Captain said. He looked down at Yianni. “Good work, Ensign.”
I saw her flush slightly with the praise. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
The Captain keyed his console. “All hands, this is the Captain,” he said. “We are now in wormhole space. Stand down from alert. I repeat, stand down from alert.” He looked over at me as he unkeyed his console. “Lieutenant, you may begin your exercise sequences now, if you please.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. It didn’t matter if I were ‘pleased’ or not. We’d discussed the exercises beforehand when we’d been planning the voyage. I keyed my own console and smiled thinly. “All Ensigns, report to the bridge. I repeat; all Ensigns report to the bridge.”
“You have command,” the Captain said. He stood up and headed towards the hatch. “Try not to crash into an asteroid.”
I blinked, before realising that I was being teased and chuckled. There was nothing in wormhole space to ram, but the old good-luck blessing still worked. The Captain left the bridge, pausing only to accept the salutes from the entering Ensigns – they knew better, now, than to allow anything to delay them from answering a summons to the bridge – as they entered. They’d had their status drummed into them by myself, Sally and the Senior Chief. They’d learnt that their ranks hadn’t yet been earned. It seemed hopeless, at times, until I remembered that we had probably seemed equally hopeless as well. Five of us had reached lieutenant; the sixth – Sally – had run afoul of the Promotion Board.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and keyed my console. By long tradition, only the Captain could sit in the Captain’s chair, so I logged the change of command and stood up. I could have sat in the watch chair, or at any one of the consoles, but I thought it looked more impressive if I stood up. I looked at the Ensigns and was gratified to see how quickly they stood to attention. I had just realised that Ensign Sandra Chang was missing when she ran in through the hatch, breathing heavily.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, quickly. “I was just caught up in my work…”
“Indeed?” I asked. “I believe that you were taught how to stand to attention?” I watched as she stumbled into position. “What exactly were you doing?”
“I was helping Lieutenant Kennedy with the inventory and we were in the midst of the medical supplies when you called me to the bridge,” she said. “She told me to go, but I had to put down the lists first before I left her.”
“Really,” I said. She held my eyes and I decided that she was probably telling the truth. If she were lying – and stupid enough to invoke the name of a Lieutenant in the lie – it would come out soon enough. “Why did you run onto the bridge?” I spoke again before she could answer. “Officers are expected to maintain a basic decorum at all times, as you know. What would have happened if a passenger had seen you running through the corridors?”
I smiled, slightly. It was odd, but passengers onboard starships were regarded as minor children at best, irritations at worst. On second thought, remembering the reporters, there might be a point to the concept. The reporters had nearly gotten themselves killed more than once. Part of me still wished that someone had arranged an accident for Frank Wong before he died on Heinlein.
“They would think that something was wrong and panic,” I said, coldly. “Passengers have no sense of what is right and wrong onboard a starship. Instead of waiting in their cabins for orders, they might run around the corridors screaming, spreading the panic still further. If they did that, how much of the starship’s corridors would they block up?”
I looked at her. “One demerit for running in the corridors,” I said. I saw the suppressed groan. Working off demerits involved hard and disgusting work, or hours upon hours of exercises in the gym. She already had too many to work off. We didn’t allow Ensigns to work them off while on duty. It would be the middle of next week by the time they had a chance to work them all off. “I trust that the lesson is taken?”
She nodded, slowly. “Good,” I said. “Evgenia, I believe that you had the highest scores on the tactical consoles at the Academy? Perhaps you would like to take the console?”
“Yes, sir,” Ens
ign Evgenia Agathe said. She was a slight girl, with an appearance that suggested that she was barely entering her teens, but there was nothing wrong with her mind. Given enough time, she might even be mistaken for adult – as well as a competent officer. “Ah…is it set to exercise settings?”
I smiled. “Well spotted, Ensign,” I said. At the moment, the console was live, even though there was nothing to shoot at inside the wormhole. “If you’d used the console without checking, it would have earned you five demerits.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, tightly. It was a little cruel – five demerits would have pushed her over the line and earned her harsher punishment – but it had to be done. She started to look for the switch they would have shown her on the Academy, but she was wasting her time. They’d been removed from starships for over twenty years. I’d made the same mistake myself.
“It isn’t there,” I said, and keyed my console. “Engineering, this is Lieutenant Walker. Disengage the bridge controls. We’re going to be running simulations for the next hour.”
“Certainly,” the Engineer said. I guessed that he was just as happy that the Ensigns would be out of his hair. They couldn’t be trusted in Engineering until much later, and even then, they would be carefully supervised. “Authorisation code?”
“Alpha-Three-Walker,” I said, clearly. “Disengage the systems now.”
“Bridge controls disengaged,” the Engineer said. “Have fun.”
I smiled. It was true that we’d used the system for games – games with a very practical purpose – and gambling on Devastator, but we couldn’t do that here until the Ensigns could be trusted to wipe their own bottoms without supervision. I reached over Evgenia’s shoulder, noting the SIMULATION ACTIVE icon that had appeared in the display, and brought up the first simulation, a missile attack on the Jacques Delors from another starship.
“All right,” I said. I pushed as much drama into my voice as I could. “The defence of this vessel is in your hands. Your actions will determine if we survive to tell the tale or die in a ball of exploding plasma. And, if you last more than ten minutes, I’ll cancel half of your demerits.”
“Yes, sir,” Evgenia said. I was pleased to see that she had no illusions about my offer. I wouldn’t have given her something easy to do to work off even one demerit. “When do I begin?”
I touched the console. “Now.”
The tactical simulation, I was surprised to note, had been improved in the wake of the UN’s war with the Heinlein Resistance Fleet. Originally, it had consisted of a makeshift pirate vessel – a converted freighter – that somehow held and fired more missiles than was physically possible. Now, it featured a Heinlein starship flying the Skull and Crossbones and performing rapid and unpredictable manoeuvres to prevent its firing patterns becoming predicable. If it were real, we would have shot back with our own missiles, but now…all Evgenia had to do was keep us unhurt. By program fiat, the starship could survive no less than three hits, even with nukes. A fourth hit would be devastating.
I smiled. At first, the missiles had come in one by one and had been easy to knock down. As the simulation progressed, they had started to come in pairs, and then in entire salvos, each one packing enough power to take out the entire starship. Evgenia coped well at first – I’d have been surprised if she didn’t – but as the missile barrage grew stronger, I could see the tension as she bent over the console. It took upwards of five to ten seconds of continuous burn from the lasers to take out a missile and while a point defence laser was dealing with one missile, another could become a problem. Some of the missiles failed to find a targeting vector and slipped by into space harmlessly – the tactical program counted hitting one of them as a loss – but most of them angled in on the ship, looking for weaknesses.
“Shit,” Evgenia said, suddenly. I let it pass, even though that should have earned her a reprimand; the missiles had suddenly split apart into smaller missiles, each one racing towards her position. We’d seen that trick before on Heinlein, even though the smaller missiles couldn’t carry large warheads, and it never failed to irritate the point defence controllers. The UN kept promising that they’d find a way to identify such missiles before they separated, but I wasn't holding my breath. If tactical experts like Captain Harriman and Captain Shalenko hadn’t been able to separate them I doubted that anyone else could, at least in a way we could use. “Sir, I…”
“Focus,” I snapped.
The screen flickered red suddenly; a missile had slipped through her point defence web and struck the ship. In real life, the entire ship would have heaved, power fluctuations would have torn through the ship and vital components would have burned out, causing havoc. In a simulator, we could fix all the damage with the touch of a button and study our mistakes endlessly. Evgenia swore again and redoubled her efforts, but now the swarms of missiles were coming in faster and faster. The simulators didn’t care about the drive field limitations that we – and Heinlein, among the other colonies – had to respect. We could test our Ensigns against missiles that didn’t – yet – exist in real life. The screen flickered red again…and this time the computer ruled that half of the point defence weapons had been knocked out of commission. I looked at the timer – seven minutes – and smiled. A moment later, the ship was destroyed…
“Pause simulation,” I ordered. “Not too badly done, Ensign.”
“I lost,” Evgenia said. She hesitated. “Why don’t we let the computer do it?”
“We use the computer to support your efforts,” I pointed out. It was true. Once Evgenia had marked a missile down for destruction, the computers had taken over and burned the missiles out of space. “We don’t let the computers do everything because they can be tricked, or spoofed, in ways that a human would see through. The best tactical officers learn an intuition about such matters that computers never develop.” I paused. “Any other questions?”
“Yes,” Evgenia said, slowly. “Why do we have imaginary missiles in the simulation?”
“You handled yourself well against missiles that moved faster than anything known in space,” I explained. “If you can cope with them, you can cope with the slower missiles we have to deal with in real life – without thinking that you know everything you could possibly face. Our enemies develop new weapons and tricks, Ensign, and they’ve used them to surprise us before. We put you through hell in hopes that it will keep you alive.”
I looked over at Ensign Geoffrey Murchison, he who had stood up for Yianni. “Well, Ensign?” I asked. “Would you like to try?”
Geoffrey gulped. “Do I get the demerit reduction as well?”
“Ten minutes,” I said, motioning Evgenia away from the tactical console. She looked vaguely surprised that the seat wasn’t covered in sweat. “Good luck.”
Geoffrey lasted eight minutes before he lost his ship as well. He hadn’t done badly at first – and he’d clearly been watching what had happened to Evgenia, learning from her experience – but he missed a scatter-missile before it scattered, right into his face. The point defence computers overrode at once, but it was too late to prevent the three fatal hits. He didn’t swear and listened carefully when I outlined what had gone wrong.
“There are no clues in the display as to what missile is what,” I said, “but if you watch carefully, you may notice slight hints. That one, however, drove in like a standard missile and you ignored it until it was too late.”
Geoffrey blinked. “But…no clues,” he said. It wasn't entirely accurate, but picking up on the clues would require experience. “That’s not fair.”
I snorted. “Whoever told you that the universe was fair?” I asked. “Yianni – your turn. Try and last longer then Geoffrey.”
Yianni lasted five minutes. I replaced her with Sandra and she lasted seven minutes. Allan, who went last, had studied carefully and managed to last nine minutes, but only Sally – who’d been doing it for years – managed to cross the ten minute limit. It wasn't so useful in her case. Because of her age and
general experience, she hadn’t been given a demerit for years.
“That,” I said, pointing to Sally, “is what you have to match.” I smiled at their expressions. Sally had made it look easy. “You’ll be drilling time and time again on this console – and others, set up down below. You’ll be registered in the ship’s computers and anyone who survives longer than nine minutes will receive a merit point. Anyone who dies before passing the five minute mark will receive one demerit instead.”
“I don’t understand,” Evgenia said, slowly. “I’ve studied tactical records at the Academy and no ship ever had an engagement like that one.” She nodded towards the console. “Why do we have to practice like that?”
I smiled. “First, the engagement we created for you is theoretically possible,” I explained. “I admit that no ship has ever had to fight such an intensive battle, but it is possible. Furthermore, there are…issues in real battles that don’t arise in simulations, and if we programmed the simulation to let you only practice what we have experienced, you’d be at a disadvantage. The purpose of this training session is to teach you how to think and act quickly, not to practice real battles.
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 26
