Valor's Stand

by Kal Spriggs

  The next three squadrons of my team had dived in on the enemy squadrons in the seconds after they engaged my squadron. It had happened fast, so fast that I couldn't tell which fighters my squadron had managed to hit and which they had, but at the end of it, forty warp drive fighters swept past our second line, with only Gyrfalcon's squadron remaining between them and their targets.

  The attacks from the flanks had driven the group into a tighter formation, much like what they'd use on a final attack run against a ship, rather than what someone would normally use to engage warp fighters, but they outnumbered the last squadron four to one and their commander pressed that advantage, diving straight at Gyrfalcon's squadron in an attack to clear the last threat out of his path.

  Gyrfalcon went straight in. Again, the engagement of particle beams happened so quickly that I couldn't follow it... right up until the matter-antimatter detonations erupted in the middle of the enemy formation. I blanched as I realized what had happened. Gyrfalcon had attacked the enemy formation in waves, getting them to concentrate in on me, then boxing them in from the sides, so that they drew closer and closer together in a tight formation... and then finally dropping eighty antimatter bombs right in the teeth of the enemy formation.

  “Simulation terminated. Victory to defending team,” Star Commandant Athena announced. The holographic projections stilled and the artificial hum of the fighter's engines died.

  I climbed out of my simulator. Gyrfalcon slid out of his, and the other three Erewhon midshipmen spoke softly. There wasn't any of the cheering and bragging that I would have seen from at least some of the cadets back home, nor was there any of the banter I would have expected. Gyrfalcon and another midshipman spoke softly, the third midshipman was on his datapad, and the fourth one was off to the side, eyes closed, rocking back and forth a bit as if listening to music.

  Their behavior seemed a bit strange to me. I didn't pay it much mind, though, since I was pondering that attack. I didn't know about the accuracy of the result. I couldn't help but feel it had been a bit optimistic to fire eighty guided bombs at half as many moving targets and hit all of them, even with near misses. The guided bombs might have been some improvement over dumb bombs, but the enemy fighters had still been spread across well over forty thousand square kilometers of empty space.

  I kept that off my expression as Gyrfalcon gave me a nod, “Good job, Biohazard. Sorry I had to use you as bait, but...” he shrugged, “someone had to do it.”

  “I understand,” I told him. I did, really. I was a relative unknown. Gyrfalcon had trained with the others in his team, they obviously knew one another. I was the outsider, so until I showed that I knew what I was doing, I was going to be the weak link in their team.

  I guess I'd better show them otherwise.

  ***

  Chapter 6: At This Point, I'm Used To Being Constantly Tested

  We started off with a series of examinations and for as busy as things were back at the Century Military Academy, the Erewhon Officer Training School wasn't a vacation. Most of the Erewhon midshipmen had already completed their three years of mixed on-the-job training and classroom education. For them, Officer Training School was the final set of hurdles for them on the path to commissioning. We didn't have any other assignments. It wasn't like the Century Military Academy where we had assigned positions at the school, plus the real-world duty of being the rapid response force in case of some kind of attack or natural disaster.

  Here there was nothing to focus on but the classes, assignments, and many, many exams.

  Most of those exams were simulations just like the fighter sim they had started with. Erewhon's use of incredibly detailed holograms were in full force for these. We went through tactical combat scenarios with full holographic support, fighting out engagements complete with holographic enhancements, sound effects, and tactile support like shaking or shifts in gravity to show battle damage. It was one thing when we did that in the seat of a fighter craft, but on the Defense Station, they scaled that all the way up to the bridges of starships.

  Early on, they split us up, so Alexander and I rarely worked together. Instead, I was on a team with four Erewhonese midshipmen: Gyrfalcon, Hem, Toro-Hakka, and La Reye. They all knew one another and I felt exactly like an outsider, especially as I tried to adapt to their different layouts for displays, control systems, and the different tactics that they followed.

  Century mostly made use of older, nearly obsolete, fighter and corvette craft. We had a handful of destroyers that were a bit newer, but most of our ships were old. They'd been old when my grandmother, Admiral Armstrong, had been born. We'd done some modernization, but most of that was incremental improvements on sensors and communications, and by and large, everything mirrored the original producers of the vessels, it was laid out much like the UN Star Guard. It made sense for us, since even our newer ships were bought from them.

  Erewhon's System Defense Force had home-built everything. They had their own fighter craft, O'Bannons, their own corvettes, Freedom- and Liberty-classes, and their own destroyers, light cruisers, and even heavy cruisers. And the layouts of every panel and display were subtly or sometimes radically different. They had a separate electronic warfare officer, which I found surprising. On Century, that position normally included jamming communications, and it fell under the communications officer. But in our five person teams, the electronic warfare officer was a separate and distinct assignment when we formed a bridge team. They pretty much ignored the role of the communications officer, putting it under the sensors officer.

  The other positions made sense enough: Commanding Officer was in charge, the tactical officer ran the weapons, the sensors officer localized and identified contacts, and the engineer managed the warp drive and power to all the primary and secondary systems.

  That first fighter simulation had concluded and we'd gone straight into a celestial navigation exam where we were given glimpses of stars and then told to triangulate our relative positions based off identifying features. It started out with stationary images and by the end of the second hour, the starscapes were spinning while the notional ships we were on simulated damage like smoke, alarm klaxons, and pressure changes. The last hazard in particular had me grasping for my helmet, but I didn't have one, so I just gritted my teeth as my ears popped and I picked out unique stellar features, fighting nausea all the while.

  Century hadn't emphasized operations outside of the system, so that had been more challenging than I'd liked. I'd had to rely quite a bit on my implant to screen through data, more than I would have liked, since I hadn't really done this kind of triangulation without a nav-computer beyond some basic iterations. But I finished with ten out of ten at the end of it, whether I'd had to use my implant or not.

  We went from that into a route and trajectory analysis exam, mapping out routes and weapons fire, avoiding civilian stations, moons, asteroids, and other obstacles. This one was relatively easy for me, we did much the same back in my third class year at the Academy, so I went through the various problem sets one after the next, right up until I hit a problem that stumped me a bit. The last question required us to plot trajectories and weapons fire and then a short-range strategic warp into a second group of enemies, but we had to plot in the impact of warp drive missiles that would be sweeping in from the first engagement. It made my head hurt a bit as I had to think about not just where my ships were, but where they'd be, and how to avoid hitting them with shots that I'd fired at relativistic speeds, while jumping past those shots in FTL warp.

  I managed it, but that one problem took me most of an hour to work through. It wasn't something I'd really had to contemplate. The Century Planetary Militia didn't normally think in the terms of using our strategic warp drive to go faster than light during an engagement. The basic doctrine was that the strategic drive, if a ship had one, was for getting a ship into or out of combat quickly, not for tactical moves within a greater engagement. The risk was high enough that a ship's FTL warp drive w
ouldn't be able to bleed enough energy to allow it to be used to escape if it was used that way.

  I could see the implications from the other side of things, though. I wondered if it was a blind-spot that perhaps someone should bring up. I'd have to ask the Admiral about it when I got back. I made note of it, and I had the feeling that it wouldn't be the last thing I took note of.

  ***

  After the first couple of days, they switched up our teams a bit. Gyrfalcon had been more or less assigned as the default team leader, so I wasn't surprised that they made that official. They pulled out La Reye and Hem, and replaced them with Hawkins from the MCA and Jenkins, another Erewhon midshipwoman.

  Hawkins was the tall, sandy-haired young man who'd given Alexander and I nods on our arrival. He had a cheerful smile and he somewhat reminded me of my boyfriend Kyle, though obviously I wasn't interested him in the same way.

  Jenkins mostly kept to herself, even more than me. It struck me as odd, in that she wasn't even part of Gyrfalcon's group. Hawkins fit in with them more than she did, his cheerful smile and friendly nature allowing him to mix in with the group. She just went through each exercise with a focused expression.

  As we finished up another fighter sim, I paused next to her simulator as she climbed out. “That was a nice move you did there, the whole inverted spiral there at the end.” I'd only managed to even catch it through my implant, but she'd dove in against an enemy ship with her squadron executing a weird, snake-like motion that had avoided most of the enemy fire.

  Jenkins just stared at me for a moment, then gave the slightest nod and walked off.

  I stared after her, feeling a bit confused.

  “Don't mind her, Biohazard,” Gyrfalcon said, coming up from behind me. “She's... well, she's not like us.”

  “That seems kind of harsh,” I noted, feeling defensive for the other woman.

  Gyrfalcon held up his hands, “She's not on the leader spectrum. She's not... well, she's not like us.” I felt oddly pleased to be included in that collective “us.” “She was identified and selected for her proficiencies and skill, not for her ability to build a team and integrate.”

  “Why is she on the officer track, then?” I asked. “Seems that kind of personality would be an issue as a squadron leader. I mean, if she's assigned to a squadron, she'll have to deal with other pilots, right?”

  “Well, obviously--” He broke off and blinked at me, clearly catching himself from going on. After a moment, he gave me a wooden smile, “Well, everyone has their skills, right? Hey, we need to get going, next exam starts in five.” He walked past me quickly. It was such an obvious change of topic that it piqued my interest. There was something he wasn't telling me, something he'd clearly been told not to tell me.

  “Well, that sure is interestin' don't ya think?” Hawkins drawled. I looked over at the MCA cadet who gave me a slight friendly smile. “Of course I was listening. We're just as curious about our Erewhon allies as you.”

  “Learning anything?” I asked.

  He flashed me his white teeth, “Maybe we could talk about it tonight, assuming we have any free time, we could talk it out over dinner?”

  Despite myself, my heart raced a bit at his smile. It was every bit as friendly as Kyle's and it actually made my heart ache a bit as I thought of Kyle and how much I missed him. “Sure,” I heard myself say, “that sounds good.”

  He gave me a nod and then he too stepped out of the room. I took a moment to get my heart under control, decided I really needed to write a message to Kyle, and then followed after.

  ***

  “They sure do like their holograms, eh?” Hawkins asked as we scarfed our dinner. He had a folksy, easy-going drawl that almost made him sound slow. Having seen him in the simulator, I wasn't fooled. He had a sharp mind behind that easy-going exterior. I figured he was from the Mason colony, of the Mason Corvale Alliance. They'd been settled by colonists from North America, even some of the same regions as the Firsts on Century had come from. They'd retained a mostly rural lifestyle of farmers, ranchers, and the like. The other world, Corvale, was settled predominantly by second wave colonists from the Parisian Sector and was far more urban.

  The two colonies had been involved in disputes and even warfare over system resources and colonization rights for decades and they’d only really unified a government in the past fifteen years or so.

  I'd waved Alexander off as he'd started to come over and sit next to me. He'd given me a curious look, but he'd nodded and took a seat with a couple of the Erewhon midshipmen from his team.

  I followed Hawkin's gaze to the bulkhead of the mess hall. The entire bulkhead looked like a window out on the star system. More specifically, it looked so real that the first time I'd stepped into the room, I'd found myself holding my breath, half afraid that the wall simply wasn't there. But I knew there was a corridor on the far side of that bulkhead, and I watched someone emerge from a hatch to that corridor, even as I watched the clouds roil on the gas giant below us.

  “Yeah,” I said, “they sure do.”

  “So, something Jean Paul and I have noticed,” he jerked his head over at the other MCA cadet, who sat talking with another pair of Erewhon midshipmen. He pronounced his companion's name with the proper french accent somehow without dropping his drawl. That told me that even if I were about to underestimate his intelligence, then I really shouldn't. “Star Commandant Athena seems to be just about everywhere, doesn't she?”

  “Her?” I asked, blinking. “Well, yeah, I sort of thought having someone of her rank oversee one team was excessive, but...” I trailed off as I saw Hawkins smirk in response. “What?”

  “I would guess, that for your team, she gives every exam briefing, right?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, “I assume there's other officers assigned to each team, right?”

  Hawkins shook his head, his smirk growing. “Would you believe that she gave every briefing for my old team, and for Jean Paul's team, too, and now she's giving briefings on this team. It sure do tickle my interest about how she manages to be in so many places at once.”

  I was going to have to ask Alexander whether she briefed his team, too. But for now, my mind ran over the problem. How could she be in so many places at once? The obvious answer was that she wasn't. Maybe it was a hologram, maybe she was some kind of advanced program: an artificial person. “Huh.”

  Hawkins nodded, “And all the Erewhon midshipmen, they just sort of accept it. Like they accept that someone with zero people skills like Jenkins can go to a fighter squadron. There's stuff we're missing.”

  “We?” I raised an eyebrow.

  His smile faded, replaced by what was possibly the first serious expression I'd ever seen on his face. “Look. Erewhon may be important. God knows, they've got more ships than any single-star-system nation I've ever heard of, but let's not pretend that Century or the MCA is entirely comfortable with them as allies. I mean, how much do we even know about them? They only share what they want. They restrict access to their worlds. And they have them,” he hiked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the Drakkus Empire representatives, “in this class, a class I was told was to help build alliances against Drakkus.”

  “Yeah,” I couldn't help but agree. “But you know they're probably listening to us talk, right?”

  “Of course they are,” Hawkins smiled again. “And one of the things I they told before I came here was to make it clear to them that the MCA doesn't like being left in the dark, not even by our 'friends.' So far I feel like this alliance and all our good-faith efforts hasn't led to much, you know?”

  I understood that, but I didn't feel comfortable doing something potentially impacting how Erewhon and Century would deal with one another, not when I hadn't seen anything overtly sinister.

  “Anyway, all I want is them to pull back the curtain just bit, ya know?” Hawkins sighed. “I get tired of not knowing what's going on, of not being given enough information to make a call. I mean, we're fixin’ t
o have that Erewhon-only exam tomorrow, the electronic warfare exercise.” He shook his head. “All six of us get to sit in a tactical comparison exam, instead. Oh, boy.” He rolled his eyes.

  I didn't really know how to respond to that. As much as I wanted to defend Erewhon, I didn't know the reasons for their secrecy. I knew that we weren't seeing everything. I also knew that they didn't seem to trust us.

  Hawkins didn't seem to need a response. He dug into his food and we finished our meals in silence. “Just so you know,” he said as we finished, just before I was going to rise and put away my dishes and tray, “the MCA is going to stand by Century. We don't cut our friends loose when the going gets rough.”

  “I hadn't doubted that,” I told him honestly. I knew they hated Drakkus almost as much as I did and I knew that the Admiral had seemed to think highly of them. That was enough for me.

  “It took us almost three centuries to get our act together, to put together a system government and all that.” Hawkins looked sad as he said that. “And believe me when I say to you, I understand, the worlds of Mason and Corvale understand, exactly what your system went through with that whole outside influence game from Drakkus.” He looked like he wanted to spit. “They instigated and prolonged our war for... well, for a lot longer than we should have let them. It's not something we're about to forget, nor is the fact that through all of that, Century has had our backs. Your people have dealt fairly with mine, your missionaries have built hospitals in our system while our people were too busy slaughtering one another to care for our own wounded, and your people bore the brunt of a couple of Culmor raids that, if you hadn't helped stop them, they would have rolled over us.”

  He gave me a steady nod, “We've got your backs, that's all I'm saying.”