Those without cat pilots laughed. Those with, just smiled.
We arrived back where we’d started from some minutes later, and the hollos all vanished. Down in the pilot’s mess, Serena, Brown, and I found a loud party already in progress. Nothing like blooding new squadrons on the same day they were formed, with no danger of casualties.
There was a shout of “Wing commander on deck” as we entered, causing everyone to come to attention, but Brown cancelled it pretty rapidly with an “As you were”, which had everyone yelling again in seconds. We had tankards of beer pushed into our hands, and the next couple of hours were an education in how pilots actually behaved after a successful mission.
Brown retired to the XO’s suite fairly early, but Serena and I stayed until the bar closed.
Both of us enjoyed bed sport that night.
Twenty Six
The rumour was proved correct.
I woke the next morning to find my status screen included the location of a new station in the system, and the fact all thirteen ships were now docked at it. So was the liner, while Diplomat was now gone. The station had turned up with a complete resupply for each ship, designed for the pilots now on them, and was already completed by the station container moving system, and each ship’s cargo droids.
There was also a surprise for me. A small package was sitting on the bedside table, and when I opened it, I found a Meritorious Service Medal, and a hand written note saying, ‘Well Done. Corona will be joining the Imperium.’ It was signed by David Tollin. I hadn't even known they did paper notes. I shifted into dress uniform, and found the ribbon already there.
I led forty nine pilots into the running track, with Serena bringing up the rear. The track on Judge was wide enough for people to pass easily, but not wide enough to allow two people to run side by side and still have room to pass. I did my normal thing of starting at a sedate pace, and slowly ramping it up lap by lap. This track had three places where the turns were tight, and by the seventh lap I was tapping the spot as I went around, and everyone else was hitting it solidly with their hand. It did have an arrow in each spot, but even with the wider track, there was still a danger for the unwary.
Brown dropped out at five laps, Serena at seven, and she wasn’t the only one. By the time I’d completed lap ten, very few were still following me. Leanne and Tamsin had orders to bully everyone into the training courses the moment they left the track, and I led the last of them in there, where we followed everyone else through a course designed for hitting dinosaurs with sidearms, while running through station corridors.
No sign of the new sidearms yet, but the training was good all the same. Simulated dinos fell to standard stunners, and suits went into protection mode if a dinosaur was actually able to get its teeth into a person. This happened a good deal more than I would have liked, but it was good training.
Leanne told me after that the dinosaurs were actually a new model of AI body, designed to be real opponents for training. She’d been running all of them, which was a bit like operating a battalion of combat droids. I wondered when she’d run a battalion of combat droids, but didn’t ask. She was of course quite capable of doing so somewhere else, and I wouldn’t know.
Breakfast with the team kept us laughing to stories from last night’s revelry, and this morning’s training. The AI’s were up on the walls, and showing vids. Not everyone was fit, not everyone had been paying attention to previous training sessions, and some of them badly needed weapons training. Very few of them had ever gone on a long run and then straight into a mock combat situation. Some of the results were quite funny.
Metunga had run his cats around his track quite gently. For one lap. Then he’d upped the pace considerably with each lap, until finally one of his pilots smashed into a wall, and only his suit kept him from being killed. The near misses were also very funny, but the serious accident now meant I was a pilot down until he came out of the care unit, which I now found had been swapped out as part of the resupply, to allow the bigger beings to fit. When I checked, all the ships had received a set of ‘large being’ care units to add to the normal ones. You could curl a cat up in the normal ones, but it was just as well Metunga had never had to try.
Jill had let her cats establish their own speed, while Fina had proved dragons could keep up with her cats, and Dorm had surprised the hell out of the lions by staying with them. I’d had no idea someone so short could move so fast. Woof had looked really surprised, and I was pretty sure he was green under all that facial fur. If they fought a ground action at all, there were going to be some very surprised cats when the Wyvern and dragons shifted, as I had the feeling they didn’t know just what they had for squadron mates.
After breakfast I gave Metunga a bollicking out. He was to stretch his pilots, not break them. And he was to make sure his squadron leaders understood that. I think he’d expected it, and factored it into what he’d done. According to Leanne though, he’d established the pecking order on the ship in the only way his kind understood. It made me issue a warning to Jill, Fina, and Dorm to keep an eye on their charges, in case cats thought cats should be making the decisions.
Jill sent me back a long laugh, and a vid showing her ship AI being dominant puss, with what looked like an offhand and very deliberate paw swipe knocking a squadron leader’s mug off the mess table. Even though it was not the same kind of cat, it was obvious the pilots were taking the AI seriously, and thus Jill seriously. I hoped that would be the case into the future. It made me wonder how the cat militaries operated, and if Imperium rules had actually sunk in when they agreed to be Imperium pilots.
The squadron leaders meeting went off fairly well. Brown emphasized that in a destroyer sized ship, the navy captain was their CAG, and while Judge rated an actual CAG, it wasn’t the case in this ship either. So the ship captain would be giving commands, especially while they trained as a squadron. He went on to explain fleet commands came from me, through Lieutenant Serena, and more importantly Tamsin, her AI. As fleet XO, she would be giving wing orders.
I told them they’d done alright yesterday evening, but the raggedness would need to be practiced out as fast as possible. Seconds counted in combat now, and we might not be safely out of range all the time. Jumping a fraction of a second late might get the pilot killed. We needed precision jumping, and every gun and torpedo firing at the same time. This meant every pilot had to be communicating with their co-pilot using their PC, and not their mouth. I told them to make sure their pilots knew what was expected.
I’d scheduled a patrol around the inside of the cluster, and told them we’d be spending ten minutes in each system, during which their formations would be changing according to the whims of their CAGs. This caused some of them some concern, so I emphasized the need to be able to change formation either by flying or jumping in an instant. Especially if squadrons or even individual ships went in against targets where being there more than a second could be fatal. Most of them grasped the need to hone their skills, although I was pretty sure the squadron leaders new to being in a cockpit hadn’t. Brown told me after, he’d keep an eye on them. They went back to their destroyers, to pass what had been said on to their pilots, and get them ready for the patrol.
Back on the bridge, I had Tamsin call up the new station’s AI, and I checked if there was any need for me to leave protection behind. I was told the station had five squadrons of Brawlers on board, with imitation pilots, which would be doing police duties. They were quite capable of dealing with recalcitrant civilian ships. The station also had a significant number of both security and combat droids on board, looking like a cross section of Imperium species, including the droids which had been on Diplomat and the Trixone station duty before.