“Wormhole entrance closed, sir,” I reported, as the wormhole sealed itself behind us. The display suggested that we were trapped in our own little universe. In theory, it was possible for another starship to inject itself into our wormhole, but as far as I knew, no one had ever tried. No one expected an attack inside a wormhole. It would require so much luck that no one could hope to pull it off. It was barely possible to track the wormhole vector to get a rough idea of where a starship was headed. Even that wasn’t perfect. A starship could emerge from one wormhole and promptly open a second one, altering heading as it did so. “We’re clear.”
“Good,” the Captain said. He looked down at Yianni. “Good work, Ensign.”
I saw her flush slightly with the praise. “Thank you, sir,” she said.
The Captain keyed his console. “All hands, this is the Captain,” he said. “We are now in wormhole space. Stand down from alert. I repeat, stand down from alert.” He looked over at me as he unkeyed his console. “Lieutenant, you may begin your exercise sequences now, if you please.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. It didn’t matter if I were ‘pleased’ or not. We’d discussed the exercises beforehand when we’d been planning the voyage. I keyed my own console and smiled thinly. “All Ensigns, report to the bridge. I repeat; all Ensigns report to the bridge.”
“You have command,” the Captain said. He stood up and headed towards the hatch. “Try not to crash into an asteroid.”
I blinked, before realising that I was being teased and chuckled. There was nothing in wormhole space to ram, but the old good-luck blessing still worked. The Captain left the bridge, pausing only to accept the salutes from the entering Ensigns — they knew better, now, than to allow anything to delay them from answering a summons to the bridge — as they entered. They’d had their status drummed into them by myself, Sally and the Senior Chief. They’d learnt that their ranks hadn’t yet been earned. It seemed hopeless, at times, until I remembered that we had probably seemed equally hopeless as well. Five of us had reached lieutenant; the sixth — Sally — had run afoul of the Promotion Board.
“Yes, sir,” I said, and keyed my console. By long tradition, only the Captain could sit in the Captain’s chair, so I logged the change of command and stood up. I could have sat in the watch chair, or at any one of the consoles, but I thought it looked more impressive if I stood up. I looked at the Ensigns and was gratified to see how quickly they stood to attention. I had just realised that Ensign Sandra Chang was missing when she ran in through the hatch, breathing heavily.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, quickly. “I was just caught up in my work…”
“Indeed?” I asked. “I believe that you were taught how to stand to attention?” I watched as she stumbled into position. “What exactly were you doing?”
“I was helping Lieutenant Kennedy with the inventory and we were in the midst of the medical supplies when you called me to the bridge,” she said. “She told me to go, but I had to put down the lists first before I left her.”
“Really,” I said. She held my eyes and I decided that she was probably telling the truth. If she were lying — and stupid enough to invoke the name of a Lieutenant in the lie — it would come out soon enough. “Why did you run onto the bridge?” I spoke again before she could answer. “Officers are expected to maintain a basic decorum at all times, as you know. What would have happened if a passenger had seen you running through the corridors?”
I smiled, slightly. It was odd, but passengers onboard starships were regarded as minor children at best, irritations at worst. On second thought, remembering the reporters, there might be a point to the concept. The reporters had nearly gotten themselves killed more than once. Part of me still wished that someone had arranged an accident for Frank Wong before he died on Heinlein.
“They would think that something was wrong and panic,” I said, coldly. “Passengers have no sense of what is right and wrong onboard a starship. Instead of waiting in their cabins for orders, they might run around the corridors screaming, spreading the panic still further. If they did that, how much of the starship’s corridors would they block up?”
I looked at her. “One demerit for running in the corridors,” I said. I saw the suppressed groan. Working off demerits involved hard and disgusting work, or hours upon hours of exercises in the gym. She already had too many to work off. We didn’t allow Ensigns to work them off while on duty. It would be the middle of next week by the time they had a chance to work them all off. “I trust that the lesson is taken?”
She nodded, slowly. “Good,” I said. “Evgenia, I believe that you had the highest scores on the tactical consoles at the Academy? Perhaps you would like to take the console?”
“Yes, sir,” Ensign Evgenia Agathe said. She was a slight girl, with an appearance that suggested that she was barely entering her teens, but there was nothing wrong with her mind. Given enough time, she might even be mistaken for adult — as well as a competent officer. “Ah…is it set to exercise settings?”
I smiled. “Well spotted, Ensign,” I said. At the moment, the console was live, even though there was nothing to shoot at inside the wormhole. “If you’d used the console without checking, it would have earned you five demerits.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, tightly. It was a little cruel — five demerits would have pushed her over the line and earned her harsher punishment — but it had to be done. She started to look for the switch they would have shown her on the Academy, but she was wasting her time. They’d been removed from starships for over twenty years. I’d made the same mistake myself.
“It isn’t there,” I said, and keyed my console. “Engineering, this is Lieutenant Walker. Disengage the bridge controls. We’re going to be running simulations for the next hour.”
“Certainly,” the Engineer said. I guessed that he was just as happy that the Ensigns would be out of his hair. They couldn’t be trusted in Engineering until much later, and even then, they would be carefully supervised. “Authorisation code?”
“Alpha-Three-Walker,” I said, clearly. “Disengage the systems now.”
“Bridge controls disengaged,” the Engineer said. “Have fun.”
I smiled. It was true that we’d used the system for games — games with a very practical purpose — and gambling on Devastator, but we couldn’t do that here until the Ensigns could be trusted to wipe their own bottoms without supervision. I reached over Evgenia’s shoulder, noting the SIMULATION ACTIVE icon that had appeared in the display, and brought up the first simulation, a missile attack on the Jacques Delors from another starship.
“All right,” I said. I pushed as much drama into my voice as I could. “The defence of this vessel is in your hands. Your actions will determine if we survive to tell the tale or die in a ball of exploding plasma. And, if you last more than ten minutes, I’ll cancel half of your demerits.”
“Yes, sir,” Evgenia said. I was pleased to see that she had no illusions about my offer. I wouldn’t have given her something easy to do to work off even one demerit. “When do I begin?”
I touched the console. “Now.”
The tactical simulation, I was surprised to note, had been improved in the wake of the UN’s war with the Heinlein Resistance Fleet. Originally, it had consisted of a makeshift pirate vessel — a converted freighter — that somehow held and fired more missiles than was physically possible. Now, it featured a Heinlein starship flying the Skull and Crossbones and performing rapid and unpredictable manoeuvres to prevent its firing patterns becoming predicable. If it were real, we would have shot back with our own missiles, but now…all Evgenia had to do was keep us unhurt. By program fiat, the starship could survive no less than three hits, even with nukes. A fourth hit would be devastating.