If Roy's grin had been any larger then it might well have fallen off his face. "Oh, but those Confederacy pukes are going to hate this lady when she turns up," he said. "How far is she from completion?"
"We're currently a little behind shedule," Lisa admitted. "According to that the launch would be in forty-two days, but we're currently looking at forty-eight days to finish outfitting and then a thirty day shakedown before the Alliance is cleared for operations."
"What is the cause of the delay?" Gloval asked.
"Primarily it's the antimatter cannon," Lisa admitted. "It's drawing power directly from the jump drive and the linkages are being more problematic than was expected at first. Doctor Lang from the Institute came aboard yesterday - he did the primary design work and he's come up with modifications but they'll take a while to implement. There are also some issues with the maintenance requirements for the Valkyries. The original requirements were based off the Phoenix but there are some significant differences and Major Grant is still rearranging the flight spaces after her predecessor..."
She hesitated and Claudia rolled her eyes. "He decided to show the flight engineers that it wasn't any harder to reroute the power conduits on a Valkyrie than it was on a Phoenix. What he wound up showing them was not to mess with the port compensator if it isn't completely discharged. It took a full crew a week to rebuild the compensator and he'll get out of rehab some time next year. First thing I did was have the engineers write the maintenance shedules and get out of their way."
Gloval grunted. "It seems that the two of you have been running the ship then."
"Essentially, sir. Of course, there won't be much of a role for the commander of the flight group until the pilots turn up next week and most of the command duties are relatively minor in dock..."
Relatively didn't mean that much, Gloval noted, fully aware of just how impossibly complicated it was to run Carriers half the size of this behemoth. Out of dock, he'd need a full-time chief of staff just to keep the paperwork under control. Speaking of which: "And when can I expect to be deprived of your services, Colonel. If a project this size is less than a week behind shedule you must be quite indispensable."
"I haven't received any indications, sir. A post was offered on the staff of the new Chief of Fortress Command in Pedeoo, but I'm hoping for a field assignment."
Oh, she wasn't fishing very hard, was she. It didn't take more than a second for Gloval to recall that Marshal Hayes's next assignment after Alpha Iayuvi was to Pedeoo, and the name was unlikely to be a coincidence. Hayes had a daughter in the service, as he recalled, but if this was she then she was even younger for her rank than Gloval had guessed. "Well, I shall have an opening for a Chief of Staff, it would seem," he observed. "And given your experience aboard the Alliance, I imagine that you would do very well, Assuming, of course, that you are not sick of the sight of her already."
Lisa flushed. "Not at all, sir, I'd be honoured to serve as your chief of staff."
"Well, now that that's settled," Gloval said, "perhaps you can settle one item that makes me curious. Why is the hull number for a monitor SDF-1 when none of those letters appear in the word 'monitor'? Granted, carrier hulls are numbered CV when there's no V in 'carrier', but even so."
"I believe that the original intention was to designated the Alliance-class as 'super-dimensional fortresses', Brigadier," Lisa said. "But someone at high command thought that that was too long and didn't sound aggressive enough."
Gloval shrugged. "There's something to that," he agreed. "Well now, let's see this new ship of mine." A smug looking Claudia and Roy fell in behind Gloval and Lisa as the shuttle entered a landing bay.
In the end, it took only another forty-five days for the Alliance to be made ready to depart the docks. There was a media frenzy going on at the far end of the docks as the first Birmingham-class carriers were launched, but in stark contrast, the Alliance almost snuck away, departing in the opposite direction, cheered only by a few lonely crews of workers waiting to start work building another Alliance-class monitor in the same dock, and the rather more numerous workers on the dock next door where the second ship of the class, the Union, was already taking shape.
Once the great ship was completely clear of the docks, Gloval gave orders for a heading away from the ecliptic plane of the system where they could put the ship and her crew through their paces without being observed. With that done, he left the bridge and walked down the short passage to his quarters, near the back of the conning tower. In accordance with naval tradition, two armed guards flanked the door.
Inside, it only took him a few minutes to open the safe and remove the small, heavy envelope that had been delivered by an armed courier four days previously. There was an ornate letter opener on his desk, not his but part of the furnishings, and now for the first time he took it from the desk and sliced open the envelope, spilling the contents onto his desk.
There were only three items - a printed operations order and two ROM chips that he knew from experience could be read only by a computer with the correct codes. Presumably the codes would have been input onto the bridge computers at some point under tight security. It was a constant wonder that intelligence operations could be mounted across interstellar distances when almost the first step in any hostilities was to blockade all jump points to the enemy against unauthorised travel. Nonetheless, the intelligence community continued to thrive, resourceful as ever, and precautions such as this were necessary.
Gloval unfolded the letter, paused and then took out his pipe, methodically filling it and lighting the tobacco before reading the contents. When he was sure of what he had read, he exhaled slowly, adding noticably to the fumes that were already struggling against the air recycling. "Audacious," he muttered. "Very risky, but the reward..."
He weighed the letter for a moment, feeling that its contents were even heavier than the ROM chips. In stark paragraphs, the high command had laid out their plan for victory to him and he knew that the obligation lay upon him now to ensure that this information never fell into the hands of the Confederacy. Taking out his lighter, he applied it to the paper in his hand and held it over the desk's ashtray, watching it blacken and crumble away until he dropped the last fragments into the tray and ground up the ashes with the other end of the letter opener. Then he took the ashtray into the bathroom and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
"Colonel Hayes," Gloval announced, walking back onto the bridge a moment later. "Please advise me the minute that we are clear of the dockyard telemetry and of their sensor range."
"We're clear of telemetry now, sir," Lisa replied, her tone surprised. "We should be beyond sensor range in another seventy minutes."
"Very good. Please arrange a meeting of all department heads in two hours to review the training plans we have drawn up for the crew."
The meeting room fell silent as Gloval entered. Arrayed along the table were officers from every corner of the ship, from Doctor Lang (whose reserve commission as a Major had been reactivated to put him in a special engineering slot) to Roy Fokker and his wing leaders. The colourful array of their uniform jackets spanned the spectrum and there was a small pile of white uniform caps on the sideboard.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Gloval said, standing at the head of the tables. "I imagine that you all have extensive plans for the shakedown cruise we shall be taking around the New Etiyoke system?" He paused. "You can ignore them. I have opened my sealed instructions and we will in fact be doing something quite different."
Jaws dropped, but it was Roy who responded first, his experience as a combat pilot leaving him somewhat accustomed to rapid changes of plan. "So where shall we be going, Brigadier?"
"I'm glad you asked," Gloval said. He brought up a star chart on the holodisplay above the table. "While it is of course a somewhat open secret that New Etiyoke is connected to the Forty-Two Worlds only by Class-III jump points, what is not so well known is that there are more than the two used by most traffic. To be precise, there is a jump point into the North-West system that is quite unknown and that can therefore be used without any chance that anyone else will be using the jump point and spot us moving."
"From the North-West system, we'll follow the usual route out of the cluster and into the Esoe cluster, that is, by going through the Esezre system. By joining the traffic in North-West, we should be able to mislead any observers into believing that the Alliance was built there rather than here. In the Esoe cluster we will pick up an escort from the fleet presence there and move along the frontline to enter a newly discovered Class-III jump point that will take us, via an unknown system, into the rear area of the Confederacy, opening a new front of the war!"
Smiles crept across faces as the men and women in the room envisaged the absolute chaos that the Confederacy would face with the Alliance and a task group based around her, loose in their territory, with no idea of how they could have arrived. "Can you tell us where we'll be striking at?" asked the Gunnery Officer enthusiastically.
"Not just yet," Gloval said firmly. "While neither I nor the high command have any reason to distrust any of you, we shall be proceeding under the strictest of operational security. However, I can assure you that there are some very important targets waiting for us."
"So, it should be obvious that we will have plenty of opportunity to test our engines on this voyage. It will take us two weeks to reach the first jump point on our journey, so we can make a start on drilling our pilots as we go. Colonel Fokker, are your pilots ready? I want them pushed as hard as we can. Opportunities to train with them discreetly will be few and far between once we reach North-Western, so we will need to make the most of this time."
"They'll handle it, sir," Fokker said confidently. "I've got some real hotshots in this bunch, with a good seasoning of veterans to show them how it's done. We'll be ready."
"Excellent," Gloval said, and there was a note in his voice that belonged to a megalomaniac stroking a cat as he sent minions to their deaths in furtherance of his plans for global domination. Then the amusement left his voice. "In that case, let's start with an emergency scramble with no warning whatsoever, shall we?"
Roy, as prepared for 'absolutely anything' as he could be, was on his feet before the most astute of his wing commanders had finished wondering when the drill would take place. By the time Gloval had reached over to the communications panel in front of his seat and pressed the red button (the one labelled: 'Emergency Red Alert: do not press'), he was kicking the other pilots out of their seats with a stenorian bellow of: "Scramble! Scramble! Get your pilots to their fighters and into the big black!"
The part of the room occupied by the pilots emptied to the accompaniment of red lights and klaxons as everyone on the ship but outside the briefing room wondered what the hell was going on.
Fortunately for Roy, he was as convinced as his commander was that training should mimic reality as closely as possible and had ordered that a wing of fighters be at ready status at all times: one squadron in their cockpits and ready to go, the others in the ready rooms while their fighters lined the approaches to the catapults and really upset the flight engineers who had to work around the fully loaded and fuelled machines.
Unfortunately for the pilots, they wasted a valuable minute or so trying to figure out if the alarm was real or if someone had gotten drunk and leaned on the button somewhere. As a result only four fighters left the deck before Roy and his officers scrambled off the turbolifts in their undershirts and shorts, charging into the readyrooms to get into their flightsuits; and it was a seven minutes before the last of the so-called ready wing was off the catapults. The delay was unspeakable but it didn't stop Roy from speaking, at length, to the Major whose wing had failed to take off within the required five minutes. And it didn't stop the Major from speaking very sternly to his second-in-command, and all of his other squadron commanders.
The only bright spots, relatively speaking, were that four fighters of the immediate readiness squadron had in fact responded to the red alert by closing up their cockpits and triggering the catapults that they were sitting on; and that one enterprising Captain had had his own squadron (from an off-duty wing) running close quarter drills with a mobile suit squad, the combined force exiting the ship through the landing bays (annoying the flight enginneers even more, since mobile suits running through a narrow passage inevitably bounce off the walls here and there) and had made ready to defend the ship against all comers.
Since only Captain A. J. 'Ace' Rimmer's and Lieutenant Rick Hunter's commands had actually managed to do what they were supposed to be doing - rather more in the case of Ace - they got to have the rest of the day off.
The other five hundred odd pilots entertained the flight engineers by providing grunt labour for them for the rest of the day, followed by an hour of calisthetics. After all, Roy noted caustically as he led them through a hundred jumping jacks, they'd obviously gotten plenty of sleep earlier when they were supposed to be taking off.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.
"We're currently a little behind shedule," Lisa admitted. "According to that the launch would be in forty-two days, but we're currently looking at forty-eight days to finish outfitting and then a thirty day shakedown before the Alliance is cleared for operations."
"What is the cause of the delay?" Gloval asked.
"Primarily it's the antimatter cannon," Lisa admitted. "It's drawing power directly from the jump drive and the linkages are being more problematic than was expected at first. Doctor Lang from the Institute came aboard yesterday - he did the primary design work and he's come up with modifications but they'll take a while to implement. There are also some issues with the maintenance requirements for the Valkyries. The original requirements were based off the Phoenix but there are some significant differences and Major Grant is still rearranging the flight spaces after her predecessor..."
She hesitated and Claudia rolled her eyes. "He decided to show the flight engineers that it wasn't any harder to reroute the power conduits on a Valkyrie than it was on a Phoenix. What he wound up showing them was not to mess with the port compensator if it isn't completely discharged. It took a full crew a week to rebuild the compensator and he'll get out of rehab some time next year. First thing I did was have the engineers write the maintenance shedules and get out of their way."
Gloval grunted. "It seems that the two of you have been running the ship then."
"Essentially, sir. Of course, there won't be much of a role for the commander of the flight group until the pilots turn up next week and most of the command duties are relatively minor in dock..."
Relatively didn't mean that much, Gloval noted, fully aware of just how impossibly complicated it was to run Carriers half the size of this behemoth. Out of dock, he'd need a full-time chief of staff just to keep the paperwork under control. Speaking of which: "And when can I expect to be deprived of your services, Colonel. If a project this size is less than a week behind shedule you must be quite indispensable."
"I haven't received any indications, sir. A post was offered on the staff of the new Chief of Fortress Command in Pedeoo, but I'm hoping for a field assignment."
Oh, she wasn't fishing very hard, was she. It didn't take more than a second for Gloval to recall that Marshal Hayes's next assignment after Alpha Iayuvi was to Pedeoo, and the name was unlikely to be a coincidence. Hayes had a daughter in the service, as he recalled, but if this was she then she was even younger for her rank than Gloval had guessed. "Well, I shall have an opening for a Chief of Staff, it would seem," he observed. "And given your experience aboard the Alliance, I imagine that you would do very well, Assuming, of course, that you are not sick of the sight of her already."
Lisa flushed. "Not at all, sir, I'd be honoured to serve as your chief of staff."
"Well, now that that's settled," Gloval said, "perhaps you can settle one item that makes me curious. Why is the hull number for a monitor SDF-1 when none of those letters appear in the word 'monitor'? Granted, carrier hulls are numbered CV when there's no V in 'carrier', but even so."
"I believe that the original intention was to designated the Alliance-class as 'super-dimensional fortresses', Brigadier," Lisa said. "But someone at high command thought that that was too long and didn't sound aggressive enough."
Gloval shrugged. "There's something to that," he agreed. "Well now, let's see this new ship of mine." A smug looking Claudia and Roy fell in behind Gloval and Lisa as the shuttle entered a landing bay.
In the end, it took only another forty-five days for the Alliance to be made ready to depart the docks. There was a media frenzy going on at the far end of the docks as the first Birmingham-class carriers were launched, but in stark contrast, the Alliance almost snuck away, departing in the opposite direction, cheered only by a few lonely crews of workers waiting to start work building another Alliance-class monitor in the same dock, and the rather more numerous workers on the dock next door where the second ship of the class, the Union, was already taking shape.
Once the great ship was completely clear of the docks, Gloval gave orders for a heading away from the ecliptic plane of the system where they could put the ship and her crew through their paces without being observed. With that done, he left the bridge and walked down the short passage to his quarters, near the back of the conning tower. In accordance with naval tradition, two armed guards flanked the door.
Inside, it only took him a few minutes to open the safe and remove the small, heavy envelope that had been delivered by an armed courier four days previously. There was an ornate letter opener on his desk, not his but part of the furnishings, and now for the first time he took it from the desk and sliced open the envelope, spilling the contents onto his desk.
There were only three items - a printed operations order and two ROM chips that he knew from experience could be read only by a computer with the correct codes. Presumably the codes would have been input onto the bridge computers at some point under tight security. It was a constant wonder that intelligence operations could be mounted across interstellar distances when almost the first step in any hostilities was to blockade all jump points to the enemy against unauthorised travel. Nonetheless, the intelligence community continued to thrive, resourceful as ever, and precautions such as this were necessary.
Gloval unfolded the letter, paused and then took out his pipe, methodically filling it and lighting the tobacco before reading the contents. When he was sure of what he had read, he exhaled slowly, adding noticably to the fumes that were already struggling against the air recycling. "Audacious," he muttered. "Very risky, but the reward..."
He weighed the letter for a moment, feeling that its contents were even heavier than the ROM chips. In stark paragraphs, the high command had laid out their plan for victory to him and he knew that the obligation lay upon him now to ensure that this information never fell into the hands of the Confederacy. Taking out his lighter, he applied it to the paper in his hand and held it over the desk's ashtray, watching it blacken and crumble away until he dropped the last fragments into the tray and ground up the ashes with the other end of the letter opener. Then he took the ashtray into the bathroom and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
"Colonel Hayes," Gloval announced, walking back onto the bridge a moment later. "Please advise me the minute that we are clear of the dockyard telemetry and of their sensor range."
"We're clear of telemetry now, sir," Lisa replied, her tone surprised. "We should be beyond sensor range in another seventy minutes."
"Very good. Please arrange a meeting of all department heads in two hours to review the training plans we have drawn up for the crew."
The meeting room fell silent as Gloval entered. Arrayed along the table were officers from every corner of the ship, from Doctor Lang (whose reserve commission as a Major had been reactivated to put him in a special engineering slot) to Roy Fokker and his wing leaders. The colourful array of their uniform jackets spanned the spectrum and there was a small pile of white uniform caps on the sideboard.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Gloval said, standing at the head of the tables. "I imagine that you all have extensive plans for the shakedown cruise we shall be taking around the New Etiyoke system?" He paused. "You can ignore them. I have opened my sealed instructions and we will in fact be doing something quite different."
Jaws dropped, but it was Roy who responded first, his experience as a combat pilot leaving him somewhat accustomed to rapid changes of plan. "So where shall we be going, Brigadier?"
"I'm glad you asked," Gloval said. He brought up a star chart on the holodisplay above the table. "While it is of course a somewhat open secret that New Etiyoke is connected to the Forty-Two Worlds only by Class-III jump points, what is not so well known is that there are more than the two used by most traffic. To be precise, there is a jump point into the North-West system that is quite unknown and that can therefore be used without any chance that anyone else will be using the jump point and spot us moving."
"From the North-West system, we'll follow the usual route out of the cluster and into the Esoe cluster, that is, by going through the Esezre system. By joining the traffic in North-West, we should be able to mislead any observers into believing that the Alliance was built there rather than here. In the Esoe cluster we will pick up an escort from the fleet presence there and move along the frontline to enter a newly discovered Class-III jump point that will take us, via an unknown system, into the rear area of the Confederacy, opening a new front of the war!"
Smiles crept across faces as the men and women in the room envisaged the absolute chaos that the Confederacy would face with the Alliance and a task group based around her, loose in their territory, with no idea of how they could have arrived. "Can you tell us where we'll be striking at?" asked the Gunnery Officer enthusiastically.
"Not just yet," Gloval said firmly. "While neither I nor the high command have any reason to distrust any of you, we shall be proceeding under the strictest of operational security. However, I can assure you that there are some very important targets waiting for us."
"So, it should be obvious that we will have plenty of opportunity to test our engines on this voyage. It will take us two weeks to reach the first jump point on our journey, so we can make a start on drilling our pilots as we go. Colonel Fokker, are your pilots ready? I want them pushed as hard as we can. Opportunities to train with them discreetly will be few and far between once we reach North-Western, so we will need to make the most of this time."
"They'll handle it, sir," Fokker said confidently. "I've got some real hotshots in this bunch, with a good seasoning of veterans to show them how it's done. We'll be ready."
"Excellent," Gloval said, and there was a note in his voice that belonged to a megalomaniac stroking a cat as he sent minions to their deaths in furtherance of his plans for global domination. Then the amusement left his voice. "In that case, let's start with an emergency scramble with no warning whatsoever, shall we?"
Roy, as prepared for 'absolutely anything' as he could be, was on his feet before the most astute of his wing commanders had finished wondering when the drill would take place. By the time Gloval had reached over to the communications panel in front of his seat and pressed the red button (the one labelled: 'Emergency Red Alert: do not press'), he was kicking the other pilots out of their seats with a stenorian bellow of: "Scramble! Scramble! Get your pilots to their fighters and into the big black!"
The part of the room occupied by the pilots emptied to the accompaniment of red lights and klaxons as everyone on the ship but outside the briefing room wondered what the hell was going on.
Fortunately for Roy, he was as convinced as his commander was that training should mimic reality as closely as possible and had ordered that a wing of fighters be at ready status at all times: one squadron in their cockpits and ready to go, the others in the ready rooms while their fighters lined the approaches to the catapults and really upset the flight engineers who had to work around the fully loaded and fuelled machines.
Unfortunately for the pilots, they wasted a valuable minute or so trying to figure out if the alarm was real or if someone had gotten drunk and leaned on the button somewhere. As a result only four fighters left the deck before Roy and his officers scrambled off the turbolifts in their undershirts and shorts, charging into the readyrooms to get into their flightsuits; and it was a seven minutes before the last of the so-called ready wing was off the catapults. The delay was unspeakable but it didn't stop Roy from speaking, at length, to the Major whose wing had failed to take off within the required five minutes. And it didn't stop the Major from speaking very sternly to his second-in-command, and all of his other squadron commanders.
The only bright spots, relatively speaking, were that four fighters of the immediate readiness squadron had in fact responded to the red alert by closing up their cockpits and triggering the catapults that they were sitting on; and that one enterprising Captain had had his own squadron (from an off-duty wing) running close quarter drills with a mobile suit squad, the combined force exiting the ship through the landing bays (annoying the flight enginneers even more, since mobile suits running through a narrow passage inevitably bounce off the walls here and there) and had made ready to defend the ship against all comers.
Since only Captain A. J. 'Ace' Rimmer's and Lieutenant Rick Hunter's commands had actually managed to do what they were supposed to be doing - rather more in the case of Ace - they got to have the rest of the day off.
The other five hundred odd pilots entertained the flight engineers by providing grunt labour for them for the rest of the day, followed by an hour of calisthetics. After all, Roy noted caustically as he led them through a hundred jumping jacks, they'd obviously gotten plenty of sleep earlier when they were supposed to be taking off.
D for Drakensis
You're only young once, but immaturity is forever.