“No disagreements there,” Ted said. “What other problems are there?”
There was a pause.
“Crew morale is in the pits,” Commander Williams said. She looked irked at having to discuss it in public, but she didn’t have a choice. “Not to put too fine a point on it, morale was sky-high until we returned to Earth, whereupon it crashed badly. At least thirty percent of the crew had family or friends caught up in the tidal waves and either killed or rendered homeless. Or missing. Morale has improved since the Captain made arrangements for his crew, but it’s still pretty low.”
She frowned. “And there are a great many angry crewmen out there,” she warned. “If we do happen to host a bunch of alien diplomats…”
“There might be incidents,” Ted finished. He had no idea if the aliens would consent to sending diplomats onboard Ark Royal. Even if they did, he wasn’t sure if he would trust them not to bring any unpleasant surprises with them… there, he had to admit, White Elephant would have come in handy. “If we do wind up playing host to alien diplomats, have the Marines guard them at all times. The last thing we need is a major diplomatic incident.”
He looked down at the CAG, “Kurt?”
“We are seriously below complement for starfighter pilots,” Schneider said, flatly. His voice was grim, yet curiously dispassionate. “Right now, we have three and a half squadrons, two of which are made up of pilots who have never flown outside simulations and training exercises. We were better prepared for war when we sailed off to attack New Russia. And I have been unable to convince the remaining home defence squadrons to cut loose any pilots. In short, we don’t even have starfighters for the escort carriers.”
Ted winced. After the first attack on Earth, it had been hard enough to convince the Admiralty that Ark Royal needed a handful of frigates and escort carriers as part of the flotilla. If the escort carriers hadn’t been so useless in the line of battle, he suspected he would never have received approval. But then, without starfighters, they were damn near useless anyway.
Commander Williams frowned. “What’s the bottleneck?”
“Pilots,” Schneider said. He looked down at the table, almost guiltily. “Admiral, right now, we have starfighters without pilots.”
“I know,” Ted said. The Royal Navy had produced Spitfires and Hurricanes in vast numbers, perhaps intending to sell some of their production line to other interstellar powers. But it was pilots that was the true bottleneck. A starfighter was useless without a pilot. “Do you have a solution?”
“Only one,” Schneider said. “I’d like to draw from the lead class at the Academy.”
“They’re kids,” Fitzwilliam protested. “They won’t even have completed the goddamned accelerated training course, let alone the full training period.”
“Yes, sir,” Schneider agreed. “But we don’t have anywhere else to look.”
He met Ted’s eyes. “There’s a big difference between flying a shuttlecraft and a starfighter,” he warned. “If the pilots are too used to one craft, they won’t be prepared for the other. I don’t think we dare use shuttle pilots until they’ve been retrained and we simply don’t have the time. And every other experienced pilot is tapped already.”
Ted nodded, slowly. The Admiralty was unlikely to agree to assign three new front-line squadrons to Ark Royal, let alone the escort carriers. Using student pilots was one hell of a risk — they might wind up shooting each other instead of the aliens — but he saw no other option either. There was no way they could recruit pilots from other nations. They’d have the same problem as shuttle pilots, with the added disadvantage of believing they were prepared for war.
“Go to the Academy and ask for volunteers among the top-scoring pilots,” Ted ordered, finally. “Make sure they understand this is a voluntary mission…”
He broke off. Starfighter pilots were always supremely convinced of their own skill, even when they’d managed to land so badly they’d broken the landing struts. It was unlikely that the best student pilots would refuse the mission, no matter how often they were told that refusing would not reflect badly on their careers. There were times, he thought, when starfighter pilots were allowed too much latitude. But now, with death increasingly likely for each pilot, they could be tolerated.
But if they prank my crew, he thought, remembering one incident on Formidable before her destruction, I’ll bring back the lash.
“Aye, sir,” Schneider said. “I don’t think we will have any trouble finding volunteers.”
“I don’t think so too,” Ted said, dryly. He looked around the compartment. “Are there any other issues we need to resolve?”
“The crew could do with a day or two of leave,” Commander Williams said. “Right now, far too many of them are approaching burn-out.”
“Sin City is gone,” Schneider pointed out. “I thought we were going to have riots when that hit the datanets.”
Ted nodded. The aliens, for reasons known only to themselves, had targeted Sin City with a long-range missile. There was no military reason for the attack; Sin City might have been a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it had no military significance. And half of the servicemen who might have been visiting had been on active duty instead. All the aliens had done was kill a few thousand prostitutes, visiting civilians and force an emergency evacuation of the rest of the complex. It didn’t seem like an effective use of a missile.
Unless they wanted to target our morale, he thought. Every enlisted crewman — and not a few officers — in every interstellar navy was intimately familiar with Sin City. One had been able get anything there for a price, from straight sex to VR simulations that covered the deepest darkest fantasies of the most depraved human mind. Do they know us well enough for that?
He shrugged. It didn’t seem relevant.
“Assign them passes to Luna if they have places to go,” he said, finally. Sin City wasn’t the only den of ill repute, merely the best-known one. “But we can’t tie up shuttles to Earth, not now. They’ll be needed for recovery work.”
“Aye, Admiral,” Commander Williams said.
Ted nodded. “Are there any more issues?”
There were none.
“We will greet the ambassadors in several days, I assume,” Ted said. “As I said, we have to put up with their presence, so… try to be polite, even if they are taking your cabin.”
He stood. “Dismissed,” he said. “Captain Fitzwilliam — a word?”
Fitzwilliam nodded, then waited until the compartment was empty, save for Ted, Fitzwilliam and Janelle. Ted gave her a look and she nodded, then headed through the hatch, which closed behind her. He felt a moment of concern — the bright and lively girl who had requested assignment to Ark Royal was gone, replaced by a stranger — but knew she had to work through her problems on her own. Perhaps it would have been kinder to urge her to change her name and emigrate to Britannia.
“Admiral,” Fitzwilliam said. “Do you believe this mission can succeed?”
“I hope so,” Ted said. “But we won’t know until we try.”
“We could have completely misinterpreted the data,” Fitzwilliam added. “Or the aliens could be trying an elaborate trick.”
“It’s possible,” Ted said. It was the Flag Captain’s job to play devil’s advocate. “But do we have many other options?”