It didn’t take her long to figure it out. “I’ve just manned the cruisers. I have ten frigates. Do you want them?”
“If you can provide gunners, I’ll take a frigate over a fighter any day.”
“I’ll check with Waverly.”
“Don’t spread him too thin. You know about the second battle that’s coming up. All the ships here came from Seeton, and we’re making that obvious. We want the Rebels to know who their next target is. We’re going to pull the enemy to him.”
She nodded grimly and cut the connection.
He turned to find Chandrajuski staring at him in amazement. M’Coda’s upper hands had moved to his antennae, and they were working overtime. “Where do you people come up with these ideas?” Chandrajuski asked.
“Hey, we’re new to all this. We don’t know the rules, so we make them up as we go. Got any ideas on how we’re going to use unattached cruisers and frigates?”
M’Coda answered, his upper hands still as he considered. “We assign one of Reba’s cruisers to each of our four inner squadrons. The additional cruiser will be treated as a frigate since the crews are not fully trained. With three of Reba’s squadrons remaining, we will pair two of them together, and the third will remain unattached, held in reserve.” His upper hands resumed a rapid preening of his two antennae. “This will be interesting, two cruisers paired together. No one knows their capabilities. We’ll call them super squadrons, eh?”
On paper, Trexler’s forces had increased from his original 16 cruisers to 23, but until they could study the performance of the newcomers, Reba’s cruisers would be treated as frigates. They were up against 37 fully functional Rebel squadrons. According to their simulations, the odds were very acceptable. There were no indications of Rebel reinforcements, but they could, of course, show up any time.
Trexler altered their normal tactics, but he considered it a minor change. His fleet’s sole focus would be Rebel cruisers. Enemy frigates would have to be addressed, but only minimally, and enemy fighters would be ignored until the cruisers had been dealt with. They were largely ineffective against his cruisers anyway.
He had no way of knowing if the Rebels had focused as intently on fleet tactics as his men had, but he suspected they had not. The Rebels’ secret weapon was the Chessori.
Reba’s ragged fleet of seven cruisers approached Trexler’s inner four squadrons, and a fighter came aboard each of her ships. Aboard Reba’s cruiser, the fighter disgorged a pilot, a gunner, an engineer, and thirty Empire crewmembers, most of them fairly senior. It had been standing room only on the fighter, but it had been a short flight for them.
Reba smiled when the new pilot joined her on the net. “They must be scraping the bottom of the barrel,” she said.
“Commander Sara Eaton reporting, My Lady.”
Reba remembered her from the interview process on Earth “So you have your own ship, a fighter?”
“No, I just borrowed this one. I’m a pilot on a cruiser.”
Reba blinked, figuratively. “Well! At least someone will know what’s going on here.”
“I’m not the only expert,” Sara replied. “We were told your ship had been through an internal battle, a culling, so I brought some senior Empire crewmembers. I also brought a Terran gunnery officer and an engineer. You’ll be as ship-shape as you can be in short order.”
Reba turned the ship over to Sara and went hunting through the net. The first person she found was Lieutenant Jerry Strauss, her new gunnery officer. He was already running simulations with the Raiders she had brought from Orion III.
She next found the engineer Sara had brought, Lieutenant Chuck Thoms. He was hard at work doing a complete acceptance check of the shields. A new Empire senior chief accompanied him, making notes of things that were not up to standard.
“How does it look, Lieutenant?” she asked.
“Fair. Some of the controls were damaged in the fighting. It might be a problem bringing spares on line. The Chief is working on a temporary fix. If it works, we’ll be able to run everything through the net, just not manually. I’ll let you know. The guns are next. As soon as we’re done with them, we’ll start checking our spare parts supply.”
“You can fix things during a battle?”
“No, Ma’am. Well… I could, but it takes too long to get from one place to another on these cruisers. Every gun and shield has a supply of spare parts that can be changed automatically. Unless you forget to load the spares, it works, but on your unmodified ships it doesn’t work all that well. An unmodified AI doesn’t like to change out a power supply until it’s exhausted. I’m not going to let it wait that long. I’ll give things a nudge here and there.”
“I like that idea.”
He shrugged. “We discovered right away during our training that none of these Empire cruisers were designed to take on another cruiser. Their purpose was mostly to show the flag, so we’re really abusing them. AI’s on the ships Admiral Trexler brought with him have been modified to change things earlier, so it’s mostly a matter of monitoring. Here, I’ll be busy.”
“Do you need help?” she asked.
“Keep an eye on me if you have time. Remember, we’ve never fought a real battle, so there are a lot of unknowns. If we encounter this scree I’ve heard about, I won’t have any back-up. I will be busy, and if I get overwhelmed, we could lose the ship.”
“Call me if you need help. Our primary focus is offense, but we can’t mount an offense if we’re dead, so your job is crucial to our defense. If you get overwhelmed, we’ll consider retreat.”
“Yes, Ma’am. That’s how it works.”
Reba went back to Sara. “You brought some good people. I’m feeling a lot better about things than I was. What’s my job?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. We’ve learned some things the hard way during training. Here’s how we staff a battle on a cruiser: one gunner for each battery, a gunnery control officer, an engineer, a pilot, and a captain/squadron commander.”
“That’s it?”
“Until we get more people, that’s it. Chandrajuski whittled us down to bare bones. This battle will let us know if it’s a mistake. So
… I’m the pilot. My primary focus is to maneuver on our target. I’ll be coordinating my efforts with Schumacher, the pilot on our sister ship, and it’s intense.”
“Why don’t I pilot, and you command?”
Sara considered. Her thoughts went out through the ship to study the oncoming horde of Rebel/Chessori ships coming toward them, and Reba followed her thoughts through the net.
Sara reached a decision. “No. I’d like to. I’d really like to say I was a squadron commander, but the most demanding job here will be flying the ship. To win, we have to have guns on the target, as many guns as we can. We have to remain in an offensive posture for as long as we possibly can.”
“So what do I do?”
“You have two jobs. As squadron commander, you’re in charge of two ships. You focus on the big picture, and you carry out instructions from Trexler. That’s the easy part. As captain of this ship, your first priority is to monitor our defense. As pilot, I’m focused on offense, and I’m good at it, so you don’t have to worry about that, but I’ll do my job better if I know someone is keeping a tally on our health. We’re going to take hits, many of them. These battles are brutaclass="underline" there will be damage. The AI will minimize it, but it’s a computer. You need to make sure we remain alive.
“We don’t have reinforcements to call on, and retreat is an iffy thing,” Sara emphasized. “Our opponents are just as fast as we are, so running away doesn’t work. If we need to retreat, call on Trexler for help.”
Sara’s virtual image stared at Reba through the net. “Can you do that?”
Reba nodded. “I can. I could use some training.”
“We all need to train together. We will, just as soon as Jerry and Chuck report ready. What do I need to know about this ship?”
“We’re operational as long as our fight is against Chessori. If our fight is against Empire sailors, we’ll have to retreat. Most of the senior crewmembers were killed or wounded during our fight to take the ship back from the Chessori. There’s no way we’ll compete against a fully operational Empire ship.”