SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (15 page)

"A point in our favor."

"Monkeys don't shoot each other. Advantage,
monkeys."

"Crap. All right, can you do me a favor, and stop
calling us monkeys anyway?"

"But monkey is such a funny word, Joe."

"Granted-"

"Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey
monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey-"

"Stop it!"

"I can create a subroutine to say 'monkey' until
the end of time, if you like. Monkey monkey monkey-"

"Shut up already!"

"We're done talking, then?"

"That would be great, yeah." I should have
known better. "We should do this less often."

"You brought it up."

"As you say, I am a dumb monkey."

"I'll remind you of that, the next time you ask
me for something stupid. That shouldn't take long."

Rather than being alone in my office, I took my iPad
to the galley for a cup of coffee. For me, not for the iPad. Desai was there,
looking at something on her own tablet, she gestured me to sit with her. This
was the first time we'd had some one on one time since, since I couldn't
remember. Maybe ever. "Colonel, sit down, please."

"Captain, how are your trainees doing?"

She took a sip of tea before answering. "As well
as can realistically be expected. Skippy is a tough instructor, he has no
patience and his social skills are nonexistent."

"What? I am
shocked
." I grinned.

"Right," she smiled. "It was bad
before, when the trainees were only learning the absolute basics of flying the
ships in peacetime. Now we're into what Skippy calls Space Combat Maneuvers,
and that is all new to me also. It's blowing my mind. I hate to say this, sir,
but I may already be too old to learn flying all over again."

"Space Combat Maneuvers?" I had no idea what
she was talking about.

She nodded. "On Earth, pilots go to air combat
school for BFM, Basic Fighter Maneuvers, that teaches you how to turn, to
climb, mostly how to manage energy in combat flying."

"Manage energy?" I asked, baffled. "You
mean fuel?"

"No," she laughed. "For fighter
aircraft, energy means airspeed, and the ability to gain airspeed. For
instance, some fighters are fast in a straight line, but if they make a tight
turn, they bleed off a lot of kinetic energy and slow down too much, and it
takes a long time for them to regain airspeed. While they're slow, they're
vulnerable. Vulnerable in air combat means dead." I'm sure she was dumbing
down her explanation by a factor of ten for me. Maybe more. "SCM, Space
Combat Maneuvers, is completely different. There's no aerodynamics to take into
account. It's about moving the ship to avoid being where the enemy thinks you
are, so when they target you and fire a maser or particle beam at you, by the
time the beam arrives, you're not there."

"A maser beam, that moves at the speed of
light-"

"Close enough," she said.

"And you're supposed to move the ship before a
beam moving at the speed of light hits us?" This was blowing my mind also.
"Isn't that like dodging a bullet?"

"Sort of. At the distances where most space
combat happens, it takes several seconds, or even minutes, for a beam bolt to
travel to the enemy ship. When an enemy ship shoots at us, we can't even simply
fire back down the inbound beam path, because while the bolt is traveling, the
enemy ship has also moved."

"Damn, this is complicated."

Desai nodded. "So far, we've been concentrating
only on the basics of flying the ship. Going into combat is an order of
magnitude more complex. I'm supposed to be training the other pilots, and I
still don't grasp some of the concepts. This is going to be a very difficult
month."

When I got back to my office, I put aside routine
reports for something much more important. "Skippy, teach me about Space
Combat Maneuvers."

"What? Space Combat Maneuvers? Oh, sure, but,
hey, let's start with something easier, like monkey-level theoretical physics.
How about this? The Casimir effect hypothetically allows the negative energy
density to support an Einstein-Rosen bridge, also called a wormhole-"

"Skippy, I'm serious. There is no way my tiny brain
can grasp everything our pilots need to know-"

"Man, you're making this too easy to
insult-"

"-but as commander of the ship, I need to know
the principles of SCM. The strategic level, not the advanced tactical
understanding our pilots need. I need, and any command duty officer needs,
enough situational awareness to make decisions. What do I need to know?"

"Wow. Yeah, great, thanks, is that all you
want?"

"Start small, and work your way up, all right?
How about this? How can one ship ever hit another ship? Even speed of light
weapons are too slow, ships move out of the way while a particle beam is
traveling. You told me about how ships use sensors fields to detect and target
other ships. What I don't get is, can't ships can just jump away whenever they're
in danger?"

"Oh, boy, this is not going to be easy. I'll
begin at the potty training level, and we'll work our way up to Barney style,
if your brain hasn't exploded by then."

"Fair enough."

And that's what he did. Man, I had a lot of
dangerously bogus assumptions, that Skippy straightened out for me.

First, I had been assuming that when a ship jumped
away from a battle, it was safely out of the fight, there was no way for an
enemy ship to follow it. No way for the enemy to know where the ship had jumped
to. Sure, if a ship microjumped only a few light minutes away, then shortly the
enemy ship would detect the gamma ray burst from the other end of the jump,
because those gamma rays traveled at the speed of light. Otherwise, if a ship
jumped a light hour or more away, it was effectively gone, safely away. Man,
was I wrong about that.

Skippy explained, the way jumps works is, a ship opens
a temporary wormhole at the place it wants to jump to, the far end of the
wormhole opens first, and then the wormhole projects itself back to where the
ship is, and pulls the ship through. The reason ships come out the far end of a
wormhole a fraction of a picosecond
before
they enter the wormhole, is
because of the tiny time lag between when the far end of the wormhole is created,
and when the near end reaches back to the ship. Got that? If you don't, don't
feel bad, it took me a couple times for it to sink in.

Opening a wormhole that is big enough to squeeze a
ship through, is something the universe in our spacetime doesn't like, and even
after the ship goes through and the wormhole shuts down, it doesn't completely
close behind the ship right away. Ripples bounce from one end to the other,
from the violence of spacetime being ripped apart and being slammed closed
again. Enemy ships can tell, from these spacetime ripples emanating from the
near end of the wormhole remnant, where the far end of the wormhole is. The
ripples fade rapidly, so an enemy ships needs to act quickly, in order to
pursue a ship that jumps away. And Skippy said there are ways to fool pursuing
ships, by altering the resonance of the ripples, this technique is only
minimally effective, because pursuing ships have ways to eliminate the noise
and analyze the original ripples. Measures and countermeasures.

So, jumping away provides only temporary safety for a
ship. A ship has to hope its jump engine capacitors have a larger charge than
pursuing ships; if a ship only has enough charge for a microjump, it will soon
have enemy ships on top of it, with no way to get away. In that case, a ship
has to fight in normal space while its jump engines recharge. Of course, a
higher-tech species ship can almost always jump beyond the range of lower-tech
ships, even though a Kristang ship may be able to tell where a Thuranin ship
jumped to, it would take the Kristang ship multiple jumps to get there. By that
time, the Thuranin ship would have recharged, jumped far away, and the wormhole
collapse ripples would have faded so much, the Kristang couldn't follow.

All the talk about jumping away assumes a ship is able
to jump away, because enemy ships can project a damping field that envelops a
ship trying to jump away, and prevents a wormhole from forming correctly. If a
ship caught in a damping field tries to jump, it could rupture its jump drive
coils, even tear itself apart.

In normal long-distance space combat, ships rely on
two types of weapons; missiles, and directed-energy weapons like particle
beams. Railguns, while they sound impressive, are too slow for most space
combat, except when ships are near the gravity well of a planet and have
limited space for maneuvering. Missiles carry greater destructive power, a
single direct hit by a missile could take a ship out of combat. Warships are
protected by defense energy shields that can diffuse directed-energy beams and
block missiles. The problem with missiles is that, even though missiles are
stealthed, they are easily detected by a ship's sensor field, and then the
ship's defensive directed-energy systems can destroy the incoming missile. In
actual combat, an attacking ship uses its energy beams to degrade an enemy
ship's shields and confuse its sensors, to provide a weak spot for missiles to
sneak through.

The whole thing made my head hurt, and it gave me a
different perspective on what a ship commander needed to think about in action.
I asked Skippy to set up a dumbed-down Space Combat Maneuver training for
anyone who sat in the command chair, including simulations.

"How do pilots remember all this stuff?" I
asked. Not only remember, they had to understand the concepts, internalize it
until it became instinct.

"They're smarter than you, to put it bluntly. The
pilots aboard this ship are among the elite of your species."

I frowned. "And I'm a grunt who got lucky."
What the hell was I doing, in command of pilots and special forces soldiers who
were clearly, in every way, better than me?

"You have your own talents, Joe, I've told you
that. You went from being a sergeant, to prisoner of the Ruhar, to shutting
down a wormhole and freeing your home planet from the Kristang. How many of our
elite new crew can say that? 'What ifs' are fine when you're talking over a few
beers, but you can't argue with success."

"Thank you, Skippy."

"You're welcome. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need
to find a fork."

Not sure I had heard him correctly, I asked "A
fork? Why do you need a fork?"

"Ugh, dumbing myself down enough to explain
things to you, contaminated my substrate beyond repair. I'm hoping if I stab my
processing nodes enough times with a fork, I can kill the part where those
memories are stored. Yuck."

Hearing a tiny bit about Space Combat Maneuvers from
Skippy, got me interested enough that I asked Desai to forward the full SCM
training package to me. Reading the first section made my head hurt, and made
me realize that before I could think about maneuvering the ship in combat, I
needed to understand how ships operated.

I approached our chief pilot again in the galley,
while she was sipping tea and reading something on her iPad in her off duty time.
That morning, I'd seen Desai running on a treadmill in the gym and decided not
to bother her then, she'd been listening to music. By unspoken agreement, time
in the gym was private time, unless people wanted to be social.

"Good afternoon, Captain," I said, pouring
myself a half cup of coffee. In the kitchen, two French paratroopers were
working on baking something for dinner, they nodded to me briefly, then went
back to kneading dough. Something they had baking in the oven smelled
delicious. The idea of splitting cooking duties between national teams rather
that bringing professional cooks aboard, had been partly my idea; I'd been
trying to reduce the number of people we put at risk on the mission, and UNEF
had wanted to maximize our combat power. It had been an experiment; would
pilots, scientists and SpecOps soldiers resent taking time off from training to
cook and clean? To my great relief, the answer was a resounding no. First, the
hotshot pilots and SpecOps troops were all super competitive, no team wanted to
let their nation down by serving food that was anything but the absolute best.
And second, the teams treated their assigned day in the galley as a mentally
challenging, fun day off from the grind of training. Having a full day off
meant the SpecOps teams could train even harder, on days when they weren't
working in the galley. Doing something challenging and unfamiliar together, was
great for team bonding. Depending on how long our mission lasted, I considered
eventually breaking up national teams, and scattering people into multinational
teams. Eventually. If we survived that long.

"Afternoon, Colonel," Desai gestured for me
to sit down at her table.

"How is flight training going?"

Training other pilots took up most of her time, and it
didn't help that I insisted she be at the controls whenever we jumped into a
new star system. In the star system where Skippy was sure we'd find an Elder
site but came up empty, we'd had nine days of making short jumps, and
maneuvering the
Dutchman
in normal space to establish orbit around
various planets, and to explore the system's extensive asteroid field. At
Desai's insistence, since we felt that isolated star system was safe from us
being discovered, we took the opportunity for pilots to practice flying the
Flower
and dropships. The
Flower
spent several days away from its mother ship,
jumping on its own, trying to hit specific targets on each short jump, dropping
down into low orbit around planets, climbing out to jump distance, practicing
space combat maneuvers. Dropships practiced landing on moons and asteroids,
flying between the
Dutchman
and the
Flower
, and the pilots had
great fun in mock combat, dropship against dropship. The SpecOps troops, with
me, Chang and Adams, practiced flight maneuvers outside the
Dutchman
,
and we took the opportunity for extended combat training sessions on airless
moons, trying out different tactics in the unfamiliar alien armored suits. That
week, while Skippy became increasingly frustrated about not finding an Elder
site that should have been there, was great fun for the humans. The science
team got full use of the
Flying
Dutchman's
sophisticated sensors
to explore a new star system. The pilots got to fling a Kristang frigate and
Thuranin dropships around in extreme maneuvers, testing the limits of
themselves and the spacecraft. And ground troops, including me, got to fly
around in spacesuits, race across the surface of low-gravity moons, playing war
games and learning what did and didn't work. It had been, by far, the best nine
days of the mission. Now it was time to digest what we'd learned, share
information with each other. And time for a grumpy Skippy to perform extensive
maintenance on the two starships, our dropships, and our Kristang armor suits, which
had suffered abuse during our week of fun.