Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (24 page)

Chapter 26

On the Atlas Space Station

              Emily watched the battle holograph intently, unaware of the twitch in her cheek as adrenalin and exhaustion vied with each other for control.  The simulation was in its third day and everyone was running on snatches of sleep and really terrible coffee.  She had 150 gunboats in the air, a total of fifteen squadrons.  Each squadron had nine assault craft and one hedgehog to give them some protection.  For every three squadrons there was one command ship, which carried a crew of four instead of three and was only lightly armed.  From her position, Emily controlled the five commands and the commands in turn controlled their squadrons.

              The enemy force was being run by Alex Rudd, Toby Partridge and Chief Gibson.  Rudd was his usual mischievous self, dancing and feinting around the rookie gunboat teams, but Partridge was revealing an absolutely pathological aptitude for deception and cunning.  In one of the previous training simulations he’d planted rings of decoys mixed with jammers.  After cautiously fighting through the first three rings, Emily’s commanders had gained enough confidence to try to simply fly through the fourth ring, only to find out that the “decoys” this time were the real thing, eight cruisers hiding amidst the jammers. 

Chaos ensued, followed by carnage.  The gunboats were cut to ribbons.

              Chief Gibson, on the other hand, relied on solid fixed defenses.  He placed forts at strategic points to force the gunboat squadrons to either fight their way through to some target point or to abandon their carefully laid plans for something more impromptu and usually less effective.  He was also a fan of large minefields that channeled the gunboats into killing zones, where he would have automated gun emplacements patiently waiting.

              Bill Satore, the AI specialist who had designed the training pods, revealed himself as a sadistic genius.  The experience in the pods felt
real
.  When you ‘flew’ in a training pod, you felt the constant vibration from the engines, felt the pull of acceleration and even the tilt of changing directions. When enemy missiles ‘blew up’ near you, the training pod trembled and lurched, sometimes spinning wildly on its axis until the pilot or Mildred got it under control.  Satore even programmed the HVAC units to cut back when there was action.  As soon as the fighting began, the cabin became hot and stuffy, so the perspiration rolled off you in waves and there never seemed to be enough air.  The damn things even smelled:  hot electrical insulation, sweat, fear and a subtle undertone of rancid puke.

But most annoyingly, if the pod was ‘destroyed’ by enemy fire, the comm screen lit up with a fat little cartoon pig from some ancient Earth children’s show.  The pig cackled madly, then said:  “
That’s all, folks!”

              The recruits hated that pig.

* * * * *

              Emily’s first problem was that her teams were not doing well in the battle simulations.

              Emily’s second problem was that neither was she.             

Despite the aptitude tests and the early training, she was discovering that a lot of people had been put into the wrong jobs.  Some of the recruits who tested well for navigation and received training for it proved not to be able to find the end of their own nose once they went into a full-blown simulation.   Others who tested well for juggling the systems and handling the missiles and lasers turned out to be slow and ineffective – i.e., they couldn’t hit a damn thing – once in a live exercise.   And worst of all, some of those who looked like natural leaders sat frozen in their chair, unable to make a decision when they had responsibility for either a squadron or a team.

Frustrated, annoyed and a little bewildered, Emily had sought out the Fleet Surgeon, Admiral Wilkinson, who snorted and laughed.  “Well, damn, Tuttle, did you expect it to be easy?  We’re not just the sum of our test scores, particularly when we’re young. Sometimes we are lot more and, sadly, sometimes a lot less. As for finding leaders, well, that will be the toughest.  Fleet’s been trying to figure out how to do that for decades,
centuries,
and we still get it wrong a lot of the time.  It’s damn hard to test for that quality.  Sometimes the hard-driving, aggressive types get in the field and they can’t lead worth a damn.  Oh, they can fight, but they can’t
lead.
  You’ve gotta have situation awareness of not only your own tactical situation, but the larger tactical situation and the strategic situation.  Only one in ten can do that.  But sometimes that person just sits and cogitates, can’t make a decision.  You’ve got to look for the whole package.”

“But if I can’t rely on the tests, how do I find them?” Emily asked, trying hard not to wail with frustration.

Wilkinson looked at her with amused sympathy.  “The time honored method is called ‘trial and error.’  But it means that you have to be ruthless.  If someone doesn’t have what you need, you’ve got to pull them out of that spot and put somebody else in, super pronto.  That’s the test of
your
leadership, Emily.”

Emily’s second problem was, if anything, worse.  She had gone through five real-time training exercises with her recruits and had utterly failed in all of the missions.  It was always the same task, to destroy the enemy shipyard, but she hadn’t come close.  Captain Lior had looked at the tapes, running through them several times.  He stroked his chin and shook his head.

“Well, I can’t say that you’re doing anything wrong.”  He gestured to the holo of one of the exercises where Emily controlled ten squadrons as she attacked a mixed group of destroyers and cruisers.   “You’re keeping nice, tight formations all the way in, maximizing your punch.  Nothing wrong with that.”  He frowned.  On the holo the squadrons of heavy gunboats sped towards the enemy cruisers, only to be decimated by a simultaneous burst of missile and laser fire from the hostile ships.  The attack fell apart as the surviving gunboats scattered in disarray.

“Nothing wrong except you got your ass kicked,” Lior amended sardonically.

Captain Eder and Admiral Douthat both stopped by, but neither had an answer to her problem.  Abbot Cornelia had returned to The Light, but Brother Jong remained behind and began to visit her daily.  He patiently listened to her and gazed thoughtfully at the holo display as Emily’s failed attempts were replayed.  When the replay finished, he stood up.

“With respect, Commander, I am not a soldier, but a monk,” he said, bowing slightly.  “But as a layman at the art of war, I suggest that you are making a fundamental mistake.”  Emily’s eyebrows narrowed and her lips thinned, but she shook mentally herself.

              “I am screwing up by the numbers here, Brother Jong.  If you’ve got some good idea on what I can do, fire away.”

              “You are an excellent captain, Commander, but when you are in charge of the gunboats, you still are fighting as if you controlled destroyers or cruisers.”  He smiled and waited for her to see his point.

              Emily took a deep breath to stifle her temper. 
Damn obscure monk
.  Then she replayed in her mind her control of the gunboats; the tight, crisp formations, vectoring them in in squadron-sized groups like arrows.  Straight and linear.  Straight and linear. 

So damn linear.

              “Bugger me,” she sighed.

              Jong nodded, trying not to smile at her belated understanding.  “All things are not equal, nor should we try to make them so.  When a bear fights a bear, it makes sense to fight tooth for tooth and claw for claw, for those are the weapons God has given them.  But when you fight cruisers and battleships you are not a bear, Commander, you are a bumble bee.  Have you ever seen how bumble bees attack a bear?”  He bowed again and left.

              Emily spent the next hour looking up videos of bees swarming large animals, but then stumbled on footage of a pack of grogin attacking a sambar.  It was gritty, gruesome footage.  Five grogin surrounded the sambar, which had two viciously sharp horns and outweighed any one individual grogon ten to one. But the grogin had speed and numbers.  Each time the sambar charged one of the grogin, two others would tear at its hind legs in a bid to cripple it.  The sambar would whirl about, trying to catch one of its tormentors, but they would skitter out of reach and then yet another grogon would attack from the sambar’s rear. No matter how fast the sambar turned, the grogin slashed and bit and tore until the sambar was bleeding from a dozen wounds. The attack went on for over an hour and one of the grogin was forced out of the fight with a slashed shoulder, but the increasingly tired sambar turned slower and slower and eventually one grogon succeeded in hamstringing it.  The sambar still fought, dragging its injured hind leg uselessly on the ground, but its fate was sealed and ten minutes later one of the grogin ripped open the sambar’s belly while a second tore at the other hind leg. 

The sambar went down, eyes rolling in its head.

Emily called Grant Skiffington, Toby Partridge and Alex Rudd.  When they assembled she showed them the video of the grogin and the sambar.

“That’s how we’re going to fight,” she told them.  “No more attacks by squadrons in tight formations, no more grouping the squadrons to increase their punch.  Now we split up into two and three ship groups.  No matter how good the enemy is, they can’t keep track of all of us all the time.  From now on we harass, disorient and badger the enemy until we see a solid opening, then we rip their guts out.”

“But how do we close in?” Rudd asked.

“Jammers and decoys, plus coming at them from 360 degrees, will get us inside their command and response time,” Emily countered, hoping it was true.  “Then we use the lasers until we’ve got a clean shot at something good and pound them with the missiles.”  The lasers could recharge in thirty seconds or so.  With, say, forty to sixty gunboats swarming around the target, there would be a continuous laser fire from 10-inch lasers raining down on the enemy ship.  That alone could ruin their day.

“We’ve been firing most of our missiles at range and then the enemy has been able to knock them down,” Emily continued.  “Let’s use the lasers at range, then jammers and decoys to carry us close while the lasers recharge, then swarm them until we get a shot,
then
pound them with the missiles when they don’t have time to respond to them.”

Toby Partridge and Skiffington nodded, but Rudd still looked doubtful.  “We’ll take casualties,” he warned.

“We’re taking casualties now,” Emily countered.   “Better to take casualties and accomplish the mission than take them and fail.”

Rudd looked at her levelly.  “Okay,” he said slowly.  “But we are going to need an inventory of gunboats and crews to fly them in order to replace losses.”

“Yes and no,” Emily said.  “We have to game this out, but I think we may find we actually take fewer casualties over the long run.”   She hoped so, anyway.

They spent the rest of the night programming an exercise.  They caught a few hours’ sleep, gulped down a hasty breakfast and then spent eight hours playing the exercise over and over, each time making changes to give the defenders more advantages.  Finally, with only five days before departure, they staged an exercise using all of the recruits.  This would be a gunboats only exercise, starting from the time the gunboats ‘launched’ from the carriers and assaulted the ‘Dominion’ destroyers and cruisers defending the shipyard.

It began with mix-ups and confusion. 

So many gunboats launched within such a short time that squadrons and teams became intermingled and pilots mistakenly followed the wrong leaders.  Emily halted the exercise, made everyone watch the replay and showed them what they did wrong.  After half an hour’s discussion on the best way to fix it, she restarted the exercise at the launch point.  This time it was better.  Not perfect, but better.  Some squadrons still got mixed up, but Mildred quickly corrected their mistakes and guided them to the right leaders.

Reconnaissance drones reported three enemy cruisers and six destroyers in an arc between the heavy gunboat task force and the enemy shipyard.  In the past, Emily would have bunched her fifteen squadrons together to maximize the punch of their missile volley, but now she spread them out horizontally and vertically.  Four squadrons – forty gunboats – went high over the plane of attack to come in on top of the enemy, and four went low.   The remaining seven split left and right.  The enemy ships began to maneuver to defend the shipyard from all sides as the gunboats scattered in all directions, greatly thinning out the defensive fire.

“Have your ships separate and fly random patterns, but all your boats are to aim at the same spot on your target,” Emily told the commanders.  “Go for something critical, if you can.  We’re trying to make a hole in the defensive screen that we can exploit and slip inside to get at the shipyard.”

The space around the shipyard filled with jammers, decoys, chaff and the torn and shattered remnants of ships of all kinds.  Three gunboats fell, then four, then two more.  One of the Dominion destroyers lost an engine, but somehow managed to continue defending its sector.  The three Dominion cruisers filled their sectors with hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of old fashioned Bofor shells, any one of which would have crippled or killed a gunboat.  But they never scored so much as a single hit.  Emily had no idea why.