The Jovian Sweep (Asteroid Scrabble Book 1)

by Martin Bourne

  It was a pity she enjoyed the subject so much.

  Josie shook her head. She had allowed herself to drift away again, all too easy with Boyes’ flat monotone. It took an immense effort to put aside her daydreaming and try to concentrate on the instructor’s low-key mumblings. “From your first semester training you know that a blast from a modern laser cannon or cyclotron can punch through just about anything. Yes there is armour, but to be effective it has to be thick, which means armoured drones are larger and heavier, and therefore the average Depot Ship cannot carry as many.” Boyes spun round in triumph as she delivered her logical punchline. “Therefore, the most effective defence is not to be hit!” Her voice approached normal volume on the final four words. She stared round triumphantly as she closed her argument. “And so we have countermeasures.” Anyone would think she had just provided the answer to existence.

  “Now, please link in and observe this simulation, which will give you an idea of the kind of situations you will face in the examination. Link in. Yes. That’s it. As you can see, here in this sector, around about…”

  Josie adjusted her link attachments and tried to follow Boyes’ erratic observations. The woman had been a top-rank warrior in her day, according to scuttlebutt, and even a minor heroine of the First Great Belt War. Now she was an instructor, her brain neurones flabby from link fatigue, and she had a tendency to repeat the same instructions over and over again, almost as if she had forgotten she had said them. Was that the fate that awaited her, x number of years from now? That was a frightening thought.

  She pushed the concern away and tried to concentrate. She had to pass this course. It was her last best chance of getting a decent billet. The rapid expansion of the navy meant there would be places for everyone, but then there were places and there were places. The top fighting squadrons would get the pick of newly qualified link warriors. Those who didn’t do so well would be relegated to weaker units with poorer equipment, or reservist squadrons stuck out on some isolated garrison, far from the action and much hope of advancement. If she didn’t get at least a silver cloak qualification…well it didn’t bear thinking about.

  Boyes was still droning on. It was all too easy to miss the valuable little nuggets of information hidden within her ramblings. She couldn’t afford that. She had to get this right. Grimly she settled down to the task.

  *************

  Josie was deep in thought about Countermeasures and its consequences when a loaded food tray slammed down on the rec room table in front of her. It was Celene, who had mysteriously disappeared after class. She was bouncing now. Well, bouncing more than usual.

  “Hey Josie! Did you hear the big news? We’re shipping out!”

  “Shipping out?”

  Celene pulled up a chair and threw herself onto it. “I just found out! The news is spreading at light speed! Someone overheard Mohan talking to a logistics officer from the Belofte. We are being shipped off to the Outreach proving grounds for the rest of our training and our finals!”

  Josie stirred her coffee slowly. “Why would they do that? There’s a perfectly good proving ground here.”

  Celene wrinkled her face. “Who knows? Who cares? Maybe they need the space for the next intake. I heard there’s going to be five hundred of them - you know how the fleet is expanding. But anyway, why are we talking about that? The important thing is, we're going into space!”

  “I’ve been into space.”

  “Oh yes, little miss traveller! Well this isn’t the same as being crammed aboard some lumbering bulk merchant for weeks on end. We are going first class at government expense!”

  “On board the Belofte.”

  “Yes, I just said!” Celene’s face fell. “What’s the matter with Belofte?”

  “Nothing specific that I know of. It’s just that she’s a very old and very small light Depot Ship. Rede class. Well thought of ships in their time. Venture metals knocked out, what, twenty of them? Now there’s only Belofte and a couple of others left. They’ve been in service for decades and not seen much of the inside of a refit dock in all that time. She’ll hardly be a luxury liner.”

  Celene stared at her. “Are you sneaking a look at your perscomp?”

  “No.”

  “Then how come you know all that?”

  “We went through it during orientation. The military history section included an analysis of every Confederation’s Depot Ship. Remember?”

  Celene gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “No. It was boring. Anyway it doesn’t matter. A Depot Ship is a Depot Ship. A fighting ship with real combat drones on board! And we are going out on her!”

  Josie sat back and twirled a lock of her hair. “Are you thinking that we’ll get to see combat?”

  Celene paused with a sandwich about to enter her mouth. “You think we might? Wow, that would be awesome! Oh, but they wouldn’t commit us until we were fully trained, surely?”

  “Very unlikely, I would think.”

  “I suppose we can hope. Even if it doesn’t, we’ll still be on our way!” She took a big bite of the sandwich, chewed perfunctorily, and swallowed. “Hey, I hope I don’t crack up when we do start to fight. That would be awful.”

  Josie smiled and placed a hand on her friend’s arm. “You’ll be great.”

  Celene grinned, then looked very serious, and then rather abruptly opened a vidscroll. “Unlike Countermeasures classes! They definitely are not great. What is it with Boyes? I think she’s lost it. They need to put her out to grass.”

  Josie wrinkled her face. “Maybe. I wonder what that phrase means?”

  “What?”

  “Putting someone out to grass.”

  “It means Boyes has lost it and needs to…go and do something less taxing.”

  “I know that, but why ‘putting out to grass’? I mean, what does that mean?”

  “You think too much.”

  Josie grinned. “Yes, I guess I probably do.” She checked her perscomp. “Oh, time for my next class.”

  “Already? What is it this time?”

  “Cybernetics III.”

  “Ooh…sounds thrilling,” said a new voice. Josie looked up to see two other members of training class 502 standing over her, both holding trays laden with food. The speaker was Constance Beignton-Adams, a willowy blonde woman. She was staring down her nose at Josie, her mouth twisted into a sneer, an expression Josie had seen her make a lot. To her right and just behind her shoulder was her sidekick, a dark-haired girl called Lilybeth.

  “It is actually very interesting,” she responded, as coolly as she could.

  Constance gave a snort, precisely timed and pitched to convey the maximum amount of disagreement, disdain and derision. It was the kind of concise 'argument' that was very difficult to counter.

  “It's good to know how things work.”

  It was even harder to counter without sounding defensive. Constance picked up on that immediately, of course.

  “Sounds like an excuse to me,” she sneered.

  “You’re way off track Tallion,” interjected Lilybeth. “Specialisation is the way things are going, what with all the new, larger drones and their bigger crews. You got four or five people operating each of a drone’s functions, well it’s obvious that’s going to be more effective than a single link warrior trying to be good at everything.”

  “Or even a single link warrior who’s isn’t good at anything,” added Constance, staring pointedly at the dull bronze winged arm patch newly sewn on Josie’s jacket.

  Automatically Josie glanced at Constance’s arm, to find a very bright set of gold wings prominently displayed. Above it gleamed a small badge with a stylised tally mark – the emblem of the Early Alliance party, a moderate sized political movement in the Confederation, but one that was currently on the up. It was flagrantly against regulations to wear, but in practice dress codes were routinely flouted by almost everyone. Belters were too fond of their individuality. No one would pull up a link warrior over something as insig
nificant as that.

  So the woman was advertising her politics now. Josie suspected Constance would struggle to name more than two of the melange of policies advocated by the party. She didn’t come over as a deep thinker. More likely it was some kind of tribalism, that or she considered them as the “right” people to be in with now.

  Nonetheless, it was a pointed remark. The Early Alliance party wanted the Confederation restricted to its first five members only, claiming that the addition of Industry and Fortitude Asteroids, the sixth and seventh members respectively, had weakened the alliance. By extension they didn’t have a great opinion of the assorted colonies and protectorates the Confederation had gathered over the years.

  Places like Callisto for example.

  She rose. “Well, I disagree, and this class is going to help me prove it.”

  That sounded lame. Why was it you only thought of the super witty comebacks when it was too late?

  She gathered her things and walked out, trying to ignore the inevitable laughter. Celene scrambled to follow.

  “I wouldn’t take any notice of those two,” said Celene, through her last mouthfuls, “they’ve got it in for you. It wouldn't surprise me that they were the ones who shopped you to Hollins so he could screw you over on the Piloting exam. Bitches!”

  “Celene!”

  "Well I bet one of them did."

  "You don't know that, you certainly can't prove it, and anyway they might be right about specialisation."

  “You’re far too nice Jose. They’re a pair of snarky bitches.”

  Josie twirled her hair as they walked. “The only thing wrong with those two is they believe everything is zero-sum.”

  “Say what?”

  “Zero-sum. They think the whole of Humanity has a grand average for every skill, every talent, every attribute. So if they are good at something, it follows that someone else has to be bad at it. And just as logically it follows that they can either get ahead by pulling themselves up, or by pushing someone else down. And pushing other people down is a lot easier to do. And more fun.”

  Celene made a sudden grab at Josie’s carryall and snatched a vidscroll out before Josie could stop her.

  “Drone crew social interrelationships – an advanced guide,” Celene read. “I see.” She handed it back. “You should be teaching this stuff, not studying it.”

  Josie adopted a self-effacing tone. “Well, we don’t all have your instinctive skill at discerning character Miss D’Abro. Some of us need help working it out.”

  Celene grinned. “It’s easy to work out they’re a pair of snarky bitches.”

  *************

  More theory, more practice on the simulators. The date of the countermeasures exams drew inexorably nearer. Those who were taking countermeasures read as much as they could, practiced as much as they could, crammed as much as they could, and still worried that it would all not be enough. There was a surprising amount of support from others. The intensity of the Piloting exam had shocked everyone.

  Josie felt the pressure acutely. She had dropped the Gunnery advanced options because of the pressure of the other subjects. It had been easily the weakest of her subjects and frankly she needed the time for the others. Besides, there was a huge amount of competition in the Gunnery field. The classes had been enormous.

  But flunking the advanced Piloting exam made that seem like a bad decision. Getting a countermeasures badge was now her best bet of getting a decent billet. There was always a chance of getting a Sensors specialisation later on, if the Countermeasures finals went wrong, but she knew she was not as good with Sensors. Sensor operation was almost a specialist subset of Gunnery, or Gunnery was a subset of Sensors, depending on how you looked at it. Whichever, it still involved tracking multiple dots on electronic projections, and she just struggled with that. Perhaps she just didn’t have the patience.

  Or perhaps she couldn’t take the pressure. Perhaps she would freeze, as she had in the Piloting exam. Perhaps she simply wasn’t cut out to be a link warrior.

  None of that! She had to be positive.

  The exam turned out to be a nightmare. Josie started out well enough. She had to run through a simulated battle. The task was to keep from being detected, or at least destroyed, by a myriad of hostile drones. The first contacts were easy. Then it got steadily harder. More hostile drones were introduced, with more powerful sensors and better techniques. And the exam went on for a long time – a very long time indeed. Josie was virtually “destroyed” several times. At the end of it, she felt physically and psychologically destroyed as well. It was scant comfort that everyone else felt much the same. One of her classmates even passed out after unlinking.

  The next 24 hours were a dream. Everyone was very subdued. They were just beginning to come out of it when Mohan stalked into the main rec room and rapped sharply on a table.

  “Right listen up! I have the Countermeasures exam results here.”

  There was instant silence.

  “Another dismal year,” continued Mohan. “Average marks have fallen yet again. I thought that after last year we had begun to see the decline arrested, but obviously not.” Mohan shook his head in a passable imitation of concern. “Well, at least no one failed.”

  Josie’s heart leaped. No failures! She hadn’t completely wasted her time then.

  Mohan snapped the security tab on a steel grey vidscroll and slowly unfolded it. The man was deliberately taking his time to stretch out the tension. What was the matter with him? What was the point of the hard man act?

  Mohan looked over the vidscroll carefully, and then barked out “Gold cloak awards. Padsbury. Well done.”

  No surprises there. Clal Padsbury had struggled in training, even basic orientation, but he was a natural at the business of hiding. It was even easy to overlook him in real life, in spite of a rather impressive girth. Josie sought him out. A couple of hands were patting him on the back. His face was bright red and beaming.

  “And that is it,” said Mohan. “One. Only one gold cloak awarded in this whole class! Shocking. Abysmal. No wonder we’re losing so many drones!”

  Well, she hadn’t figured on getting a gold cloak. She knew she wasn’t that good. But she hoped to get a silver cloak. She should do. She thought she had done okay. Well, everyone had struggled with the same things she had anyway.

  “Silver cloak awards. Aliz, Arlington, D’abro, Dam…”

  Celene had done it! She had got a silver cloak! Josie exchanged a happy glance with her friend. Celene looked radiant, and just a little shocked.

  “…Elkin, Fazal, Florence, Giddings, Hall, Jennings Ivan, Jennings Tom, Kennet…just. Only just Kennet - count yourself lucky, Lavalle, Ling, Morrison…”

  “There is a God!”

  “Shut up Morrison! Musgrove, Nolan, Preston…”

  Not long to wait now. Josie closed her eyes and fought to control the building tension inside her.

  “…Quartermain, Sabah, Talbot, Toombs, Trent…”

  He had gone past her name. She wasn’t on the Silver listing. She felt her head drop. Dimly she heard Mohan continue the list. She must have got a bronze then. It must be. She had worked so hard. What had gone wrong? She looked up and saw Constance grinning at her.

  Mohan was going through the Bronze awards. "...Salkeld, Soraya, Stephens, Tallion, Van Dene, Zamah. That is all.”

  It was like a cloak had fallen over her.

  Chapter 8.

  Depot Ship Tourmaline, Diplan naval dockyards, Courage asteroid.

  From the viewports of the outer docking rings, Tourmaline had appeared a very fine looking vessel. She hung motionless in the outer dockyard, only a few impossibly thin lines connecting her to the station. Even through the drab, largely redundant service camouflage she glittered softly against the dark. She was vast, sturdy, menacing – in every way a fitting expression of the power of the Virtue Confederation. Small engineering craft wove around her on the innumerable errands of a refit. Flashes of light splashed from
her hull and engine nacelles as technical crews completed the adjustments and improvements.

  It was only when Courage and his entourage got close up that he saw the absorbent hull coating was getting decidedly patchy in places. It was hardly surprising. The Depot Ship had been in pretty much continuous service for the last five years. Still, five years was new, in a service where the average age of a warship was pushing thirty. And in that time she had garnered six campaign pins, two commendations and she was just finishing up her second major refit. A youngster, but one that had grown up far too quickly.

  “Very impressive Captain Wentzel,” said Courage to the florid-faced man hovering at his elbow. He felt he should say something, and that seemed suitably appropriate.

  “Thank you, sir. We will have Tourmaline ready to sail within three days.”

  “So soon Captain?” said Courage, staring at the man. “I was led to believe that the modifications would take another eight days at the minimum.”

  “That would be a reasonable estimate for any other vessel admiral, but here on Tourmaline we like to expedite matters,” said Wentzel. “I am confident my crew can get the ship ready by then.”

  The man meant it. Courage glanced over at his executive and engineering officers. Their expressions were carefully blank. What was that all about? Still, having Tourmaline ready so quickly would certainly be very useful.

  “Well, Captain, if you are sure you can be ready in three days, so much the better. We are certainly going to need every one of our ships at full fighting capacity.”

  Courage turned from the viewport and began a stately walk along the docking collar back to his quarters, with Tourmaline’s senior officer’s gaggling behind. He had completed the wasteful duty expected of him and now he could get back to his quarters and get some proper work done. Wentzel was still hanging on his elbow.