The Admiral's Grand Entrance

Excerpted from The Guardians of Peace by Jeffrey Caminsky, now available on Amazon, and published by New Alexandria Press.

From Chapter 6

* * *

“Helm, come to 220 north 15; Weapons, charge the shields, prepare to charge the forward guns.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Janet turned the command chair on the simulated bridge to face the portside screens. The simulation was turning into a disaster: none of the kids manning the bridge posts had the slightest notion of what to do. Anticipation meant nothing to them. They could barely anticipate their own bowel movements, let alone orders from the command chair. Nobody did anything without being told; they just sat there like lumps, waiting. And not a single one had the foresight to bring their lunch with them.

Like Nielsen, the rookie weapons officer sitting at his post with a confused look on his face. Obviously, the order to charge the shields had come as a shock to him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have spent half a minute looking for the right switch when he had five whole minutes of helm maneuvers to ready his post for the simple act of activating the ship’s deflectors. Or Wasser, the systems officer—a nice enough kid: bright, intense, eager to please. But so reluctant to say anything without an invitation. Eisenberg, the navigator, seemed too addled to navigate his way out of a water closet. None of the more experienced people from the New Alexandria, their sister starship, seemed to know their way around a bridge, either. Fortunately, Tony Landis—the nitwit to whom her own husband had given command of the other starship—was drilling his people in Simulator Room Five, across the hall and mercifully out of earshot.

She didn’t know how the Skipper hoped to do anything with such a group, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with them, either. The thought of leading them into battle made her sick to the stomach. It didn’t help matters when Skipper disappeared for days at a time, leaving her to face every disaster all by herself. And he was a great one for leaving messages. Always leaving notes and little bits of paper stashed here and there. Do this—try that–-try some other silly thing, they’d all say. But just try to find him when there was work to be done. Or when something went wrong.

“Overtaking target,” reported the young systems officer. “Range one klick and closing.”

“Shields up, Commodore.”

“Charge all forward gun batteries.”

“Aye, Ma’am.”

“Range one-half klick and closing.”

“Fire in the hole, Ma’am,” called the weapons officer. Janet looked at the weapons display on the armrest, to see that the forward gun batteries were now fully operational.

“‘Guns amain’ is the proper prompt, Lieutenant,” said Janet, wondering if they’d actually hit something this time. She never got the chance to find out. “Prepare to fire on my command.”

“All hands, attention!” barked the security officer. As every other officer in the room scrambled to his feet, she heard a reassuringly familiar voice—though it reassured her only for a passing moment.

“Acch—as you were,” said the Admiral, smiling mysteriously as he moved toward the command seat. He squeezed Janet’s hand, and motioned for her to stay where she was. Momentarily flushed with delight at getting to see him, Janet was soon mad as a hornet at the interruption. She glared at him so angrily that Cook mistook the look for passionate devotion and smiled, moved at his wife’s display of affection.

Cook nodded, his sharp eyes moving from face to face as he studied and memorized the features and manner of each member he’d chosen for his bridge crew. Until now, he’d known them only from their work—the silent record of the progress of each officer, kept by the computer he’d programmed just for that purpose. He’d picked three for each station, and was still unsure whether this kind of blind selection would actually yield results. Personal profiles and simulated performances were handy tools, but they could never tell him how much steel was in anyone’s backbone, or how deep the blood flowed in someone’s heart. But he had no real choice. Time was short, and he had no other way to cull through the thousands of volunteers who’d flocked to join his Navy. And anyway, letting them sort themselves seemed like a good idea at the time. He tried his best to keep his doubts to himself, and smiled confidently as he addressed them. He’d always found the best way to face his own fears was to laugh at them, and was determined to help his bridge crew do the same.

“Good day to you all, and welcome to Panic Central,” he said, grinning as the room filled with nervous laughter. “First of all, let me apologize to each and every one of you, for dragging you into this. Usually I try to reward hard work, ability, and dedication, not punish it. And I won’t make any pretense about what we have facing us. It will be lots of stress, mind-numbing drills, and endless repetition. And at the end of it all, we get to let the Terrans try to kill us. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s not the sort of graduation party I’d ordinarily plan to attend.”

Cook looked around the room, letting the rising spirits of his crew begin to take on a life of its own. He could see that laughter was having an effect on his people, and smiled inwardly in satisfaction at the thought that he could still sense which strings to pull. “I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad, by itself,” he continued. “But it doesn’t give us a lot to look forward to. And of course, after we do somehow manage to live through it all, we’ll get to listen to all the preening politicians congratulate themselves on having the courage and vision to face down the Cosmic Guard. Maybe even allowing from time to time, that—well, yes, perhaps the Navy did have a tiny role to play in the whole affair. By the time it’s over I suspect it’ll be more than any of us will be able to stomach.

“Well, then,” he turned to wink at Janet, who was, for some reason he couldn’t understand, now glowering at him. As the crew’s laughter subsided, he shrugged and kept plodding along. “I suppose it’s time to get down to basics. As of tomorrow, we begin maneuvers in real ships, and out in real space. I’ll expect and demand more from this group than any other.

“I selected each of you for a particular reason—either a specialized skill I need, or a particular skill you’ve shown. Like any other assignment in my Navy, until the crisis has passed your job here will be the focus of your existence. Because you’ll be working at tasks that are among the most important in the whole Navy, I expect you to put your heart and soul into your efforts. You will arrive early for each day’s drilling; and you will stay late practicing, to remove any deficiencies that come to light during the day. You will—each of you—excel at your assignments, because I will tolerate nothing less, and because if you are not brilliant at your assigned task, Isis will crumble like dust in the heavens. And no matter how much despair you feel during the days to come, you will also look back on these next weeks as the most exciting, exhilarating, and inspiring days of your lives. You are part of a noble cause—one of the noblest in human history, like Old Earth’s crusade against the Nazis, or the American war against slavery. Every moment you spend honing your abilities and perfecting your skills is one more slap in the face of tyranny. And when the fighting starts, and Terran guns start blasting away, every second you’ve invested in yourself will come to pay dividends. In the heat of battle, everything you’ve learned will come pouring back into your hands and minds with amazing clarity.

“In three weeks, you’ll be able to stand against the best the Terrans have to throw at us. The Commodore and I will see to it—and mark my words, we will not let you shortchange yourselves, your homes, or your families. You may well come to hate us in the coming days. But when we lead you into battle, you’ll fight as warriors have always fought—with hearts aflame and heads held proud. And we mean to see that when the day of battle finally comes, each of you will have the tools and skills to battle on to victory.”

Cheers ringing in his ears, Cook turned to look at Janet, who was now smiling proudly despite her best efforts to stay annoyed.

“Now, I need two volunteers to man the systems and weapons stations. You two— ,” Cook pointed at the hapless pair still seated at the designated stations, holdovers from the drill Janet was conducting when Cook finally made his appearance. “You two stay where you are—and do try to pay attention. I get rather testy when my bridge crew fails to keep up the pace. The rest of you sit back; the Commodore and I will show you what a starship can really do.”

Cook stepped toward the navigator’s station, and motioned for Janet to join him at the helmsman’s console. As they took their seats, an audible murmur filled the entire bridge.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” whispered Janet, as she settled into her station. She knew exactly how unprepared the bridge crew was, and winced at the thought of having two rookies manning the weapons and systems stations.

“We haven’t done this in some time, you realize,” she went on. “Those poor fools can barely strap themselves into their seats, and I doubt we’ll impress anybody merely by snapping off a few of your fancy turns on the simulator. You covered that maneuver in the briefing book, and half of them have it mastered already. At least they have on the computer. I have my doubts that space will be quite so forgiving.”

“You underestimate their hunger to be impressed,” replied the Admiral, grinning wryly as he entered the code for a new battle problem. “And don’t forget who wrote all these simulations. It’s just too bad I can’t program the Cosmic Guard to be as slow moving, witless, and easy to hit as the three starships we’ll be going up against in the next few minutes.”

Despite herself, Janet found herself chuckling as the new simulation appeared on the screen. In all their years together, and whatever his other faults, the Skipper had never failed to keep her life interesting and exciting. At times too exciting. He might be stubborn, opinionated, and too absent-minded to remember to come home for dinner. But even if he was leading them to death and destruction, at least she wouldn’t die of boredom.
© 2012 by Jeffrey Caminsky