Adapt and Overcome (The Maxwell Saga) (19 page)

“Poor guy.
Thanks again. I’m going to have to make lots of notes about all this.”

“
Good idea. I took notes during exercises every day on the Crusher, and revised them every night until I’d absorbed them. In particular, note what the other candidates are doing. Some of them are sure to come up with solutions that aren’t standard Fleet practice, but which work very well. One of the best things about the Crusher is the ability to learn from officers of several different planets’ armed forces. I think that’s one area where the Crusher’s actually superior to the Perisher, where most of its candidates are Fleet officers.”

As
hby hesitated, looking at him curiously. “As a matter of interest, what made you ask to come out with Lancaster’s SPS for these exercises? We’re holding them to provide pre-Crusher training to our own candidates for command – there are two of them on the other ships – but I’ve never heard of a Fleet officer coming along. They usually go out with their own patrol craft.”

Steve shrugged. “You guys do a lot more than our squadrons. You’re more like an old-time Coast Guard, policing an entire star system. Rolla will operate its patrol craft in much the same way. Since I’ll have to help train its crews for those sorts of missions, I figured I’d be able to learn more about them from you.”

Ashby’s face cleared. “When you put it like that, it makes sense. It’s still an uncommon attitude – not that I’m complaining, mind you! It’s nice to be appreciated as professionals. We don’t often get that from the Home Fleet.”

~ ~ ~

The Crusher was based aboard a training vessel, an old depot ship in a parking orbit near the Fleet Dockyard. Four
Serpent
class patrol craft were assigned as training ships, with their crews and the Prospective Commanding Officers accommodated on the depot ship.

Dining-in on the first evening was an interesting experience. The
usual formalities were observed, but underlying them was a sense of nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. Twenty-one of the twenty-four candidates came from the System Patrol Services of Commonwealth planets, including one from Rolla, while Steve and two others were from the Fleet’s Spacer Corps. Two of the candidates were Lieutenant-Commanders, slated to take over divisions of multiple patrol craft for their home planets. The others were Senior Lieutenants. They faced each other down either side of a long table, wearing Mess Dress with miniature medals. Their four instructors, each a Lieutenant-Commander who would be in charge of a group of six candidates and be referred to as ‘Teacher’, sat above them. Commander de la Penne, Commanding Officer of the course, sat at the head of the table.

The meal proceeded according to the protocol laid down for such occasions. All the candidates were on their best behavior, clearly trying to make a good impression on the staff and each other. Steve was amused to find that the toasts at the end of the meal – drunk in grape juice, because alcohol was not served aboard a Fleet spaceship except under very restricted circumstances – were far more numerous than usual. They began with the President of the Senate, the titular head of the Lancastrian Commonwealth, and proceeded through the Heads of State of every member planet represented on the course, in order of the date on which each had joined the Commonwealth. When they were over, Steve muttered softly to the
candidate next to him, “After all those toasts, I hope the heads aren’t too far away!”

His neighbor grinned. “If they are, we might all fail the Crusher on the first night due to conduct unbecoming an officer, by stampeding out of the wardroom in search of them!”

Commander de la Penne addressed the new class after the toasts. He made no bones about the challenges they would face, but emphasized the positive aspects of the course rather than the negative. “Above all,” he urged them, “remember that while both the Crusher and the Perisher have only seventy per cent pass rates, officers who’ve graduated from the Crusher have historically gone on to achieve a
ninety-eight
per cent pass rate on the Perisher. Not everyone goes on to the more advanced course, but those who do will find that hard work now virtually guarantees success later.

“Always bear in mind the constant, never-ending tension we face between two different aspects of our job. The first is administrative. Our services demand of us adherence to procedures, regulations and instructions.
If we don’t do so we’ll be penalized, perhaps to such an extent that our careers will suffer. However, administrative requirements can’t possibly prepare us for the second aspect, which is operational. Waving a stores requisition form at an armed enemy won’t do anything to make him go away!” His audience laughed, a little nervously, Steve thought.

“We try to adhere to our operational and tactical doctrines, but events seldom unfold according to our protocols. In particular, opponents have their own way of doing things that may not conform to our expectations, and may completely disrupt a step-by-step, by-the-book approach. It takes flexibility and initiative to deal with such situations – but flexibility and initiative are anathema to the bureaucratic mind, which prefers everything to be neat, tidy and orderly. The conflict between these two aspects of military service has been going on since the first armies were formed way back in prehistory, and it’ll continue until entropy finally destroys the universe.

“As Commanding Officers you’ll have to integrate adherence to policies and procedures with the vagaries of operational conditions and necessities. Sometimes you’ll succeed. At other times the latter will derail the former, so you’ll have no alternative but to, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, ‘do what you can, with what you have, where you are’. Such situations are the acid test of what makes a good Commanding Officer. The Crusher is designed to find out whether you can handle them –
before
you’re called upon to do so the hard way.”

~ ~ ~

Steve was pleased to find that Senior Lieutenant Frances Grunion from Rolla’s System Patrol Service was part of his division of six candidates. He took her aside on the first day of the course and asked, “Fran, how did you manage to get onto the Crusher this quickly? I thought Rolla’s candidates would have to wait until next year to attend the course.”

Grunion smiled, showing brilliant white teeth against the milk-chocolate-brown hue of her skin. “I got lucky, I guess. I was
in the process of upgrading our training standards and procedures. We don’t use a Boot Camp system like the Fleet, but we want to meet your technical norms for the various enlisted ranks, so I went through our old course materials and updated them where necessary. I was just finishing that job when you hammered de Bouff. We heard about our new patrol craft a couple of days later. I was sitting at my terminal at the time, and within five minutes I’d applied to be assigned to one of them. Mine was the first request received, so for my sins, Commodore O’Fallon decided I’d be the next Rolla student on the Crusher.”

Steve laughed. “
Who was it said something about being four times blessed if you get your blow in first?”

She grinned.
“I’ve heard the saying. It’s a bit archaic - must have been a pre-Space-Age humorist. Anyway, if all goes well, I’ll go back to Rolla to help you train our first crews for the
Songbirds
. I’ll oversee their coursework, and you’ll handle their on-the-job training aboard ship. When the rest of our ships arrive, I’ll command one of them.”

“Sounds good to me.
You’ll have to come out on a training mission with me from time to time, and take command during exercises. It’ll help you keep your hand in until you get your own ship.”

“Great! Thanks very much.”

“You can thank me by helping me during the course, and I’ll do the same for you. The Crusher’s a big hurdle to cross. We’ll help each other over the steep bits, as far as we’re allowed to.”

“It’s a deal
.”

~ ~ ~

Right from the start, Steve found himself pushed beyond – sometimes far beyond – the limits of his knowledge and experience as he struggled to master the many challenges thrown at him by the Crusher. If it hadn’t been for his six-month tour of duty as an enlisted small craft pilot aboard LCS
Grasswren
on the Radetski mission several years before, plus the brief refresher course he’d arranged on his own initiative aboard LSPS
Whipsnake,
he knew he’d have been completely out of his depth. He had to work harder and smarter than he’d ever done before to keep abreast of the course requirements. His only consolation was that there were several other students – including Fran Grunion – who’d never served aboard patrol craft at all, let alone as officers. They, too, found their lack of relevant experience a severe handicap, and had to work very hard to overcome it.

The first
three weeks of the course took place in a tactical simulator, and focused on ship-handling, internal emergencies and non-combat exercises, with a heavy emphasis on safety. Almost all the duties and tasks commonly assigned to patrol craft were exercised: escorting vessels to and from an assembly point; forming, escorting and dispersing convoys; setting up and maintaining satellites and navigation beacons; patrolling everywhere from the planet’s crowded orbitals, to the wide open reaches of the outer system, to mining operations in the asteroid belt; assisting vessels in difficulty, including fire-fighting, rescue, evacuation and recovery operations; towing disabled ships, alone and with other patrol craft and in cooperation with civilian tugs; and boarding and search operations. Armed encounters with enemy ships were left for a later stage of the course.

Each
six-student division had its own simulator, where every candidate acted as Duty Commanding Officer to lead two half-day drills every week. The other students rotated between acting as Executive Officer and staffing the OpCen consoles in the simulator. Matters weren’t made any easier when they found that Teacher would seldom correct their mistakes during the course of an exercise, unless he deemed it essential to do so in order to ensure the safety of the ‘ship’. He reserved most of his comments for the post-exercise wrap-up sessions, where his criticism was often blunt and to the point. They learned to accept his comments without showing any resentment or negative reaction. After all, everyone else on the course was being treated in precisely the same way.

They learned to help each other with group debriefings each evening, wringing every possible learning point out of their mistakes; planning the following day’s exercises together; and discreetly signaling to the student currently acting as DCO when they figured he or she was about to run into difficulties. Even so, one student in Steve’s division just couldn’t cut it. He ‘endangered the ship’ three times in ten days during their simulator exercises. The morning after the last incident, he was absent from breakfast, and never reappeared. No explanation was given. None was needed.

The dismissal brought to a head a source of tension that Steve hadn’t noticed before. That evening, during the group debriefing session, one of the other candidates – from the same planet and service as the dismissed student – made a snide remark about his colleague being absent because ‘he hadn’t covered himself in glory, so he wasn’t bulletproof’. He glared at Steve as he spoke.

Steve felt a surge of annoyance
– but then suddenly realized that this was what Admiral Methuen had warned them about after the fight with de Bouff. He knew he was tired and irritable, so he forced himself to slow down and think through his response. Instead of snapping at his coursemate, he asked quietly, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know damn well what it means!
You’ve got far too little time in grade to deserve a place on the Crusher. If you hadn’t taken out those pirates at Rolla, you wouldn’t be here at all. That also makes you bulletproof. They’ll never dismiss
you,
no matter how many mistakes you make. It’d be bad publicity for them.”

Steve bit back a very blunt retort,
and thought fast. How he handled this would reflect on him for the rest of the course, and might come back to haunt him in future unless he was very careful and tactful. In the background he saw Teacher listening impassively, but intently.

“
You’re right that I’m probably the most junior of all of you on this course. I freely admit I’m out of my depth sometimes.” He took his official comm unit from its belt holster and synchronized it with the room’s tri-dee holographic display, bringing up page after page of notes. As he flicked through them, displaying them to the others, he pointed out, “One way I’m working to overcome that is to benefit from your experience. I take notes every day about how all of you handle the course problems and scenarios. Every night I go through them, picking out lessons you’ve already learned the hard way that I can use in future. I hope I’ve been able to contribute a few lessons I’ve learned, too. I reckon that’s part of why we’re here, to learn from each other.

“
As for being ‘bulletproof’, that’s simply not true. If I screw up badly enough I’ll be out of here, just as Dorian was this morning, and just as any of us might be in future. All of us have to earn the right to command, and earn it the hard way. I’m no exception. There’s no way the Fleet will knowingly place the lives of its spacers and the safety of its ships in the hands of an incompetent officer.”

Teacher cleared his throat meaningfully.
“That’s precisely why we have a thirty per cent attrition rate on this course. We don’t like to dismiss a candidate. We know it probably means the end of their careers as line officers. Nevertheless, we have to certify to the Fleet and your parent services that our graduates are fully capable of and competent to command. Your colleague made too many mistakes for us to be willing to certify that in his case. He won’t be the last to leave, I assure you.”