Hegemony (10 page)

"Possibly," allowed Shank. "Alternately, if we had held back some of our interceptors, we could have used at least one of our primary laser arrays for long range sensor blinding, or for anti-interceptor fire. Either one might have helped the remaining interceptors as well."

Handric, the First Wave leader, stood up to face the Interceptor Commander. "If I may, Sir, the problem wasn't lack of support."

"The problem was sloppiness," interjected Pilot Officer Wimms. His avatar was that of a slender red haired youth; handsome in a rakish manner, bordering on scruffy looking, despite a pristine uniform. "Myself and Pilot Katerzi were fatally careless in the early approach stages. That set up a numerical disadvantage which cost the rest of First Wave badly."

"True," said Shank, "but you were not likely to anticipate the quality of the defenders."

"Too true," said Wave Leader Handric. Outside of VR, he also wore a bio-avatar, probably a clone of his birth body. He was the least impressive looking man in the room, short and a bit rotund. He was one of the best interceptor pilots Zandy had ever seen.

"We didn't expect a Coaly pilot to be that good," Handric went on. "Frankly, I'm not sure about the realism of having an enemy that skilled in a simulation. Coalition pilots get neither the training nor the support to attain that level of skill."

"That we know of," said the Interceptor Commander. "That we know of. The last war was a while ago. A Coalition-wide change in their treatment of daemons can be ruled out, but in this case, we decided to simulate a single ship where the commander had taken a non-standard approach and had better than average pilots."

"Now," Shank continued, "on to the next point; a possible simultaneous engagement with two hostile lance-ships."

"It'll be a mess if they get us between them," said the Third Wave Leader.

"That would officially be a 'bad thing,'" agreed Shank. "We're going to have to count on the
'Sun
to not let that happen. But good point. Let's talk about what happens if that does happen. We'll need to put at least two waves into space at one time, and we'll have a lot less flexibility for switching between beams. On the other hand, that's not a likely scenario. If they try it, they risk coming in a little out of sync and having us be able to take them one at a time.

"One thing I want all of you to start in on, as soon as this briefing is done, is to dust off the reserve interceptors and start pre-imprinting work on them. I want every pilot to have one more interceptor pre-imprinted and ready to go, as soon as possible. If the bad guys do come in one after another, we are probably not going to be recovering interceptors between fights, and I do not want any pilot to be sitting on the sidelines because he or she has nothing to fly."

Zandy nodded to herself. Interceptors
could
accelerate back towards their mother-ship. As long as the tiny fighters' reflectors could collect the laser energy from the mother-ship, it could be used to turn reaction mass to plasma; the actual direction of thrust was dictated by the geometry of a magnetic nozzle. An interceptor could not accelerate directly into the boosting beam, but it could "tack" in at an angle, back and forth, effectively enough. It was a bit less efficient than accelerating outbound, but not really a problem. But in a prolonged battle, the assault-ship would not have time to power an interceptor for a return flight to the ship, and after an attack run, the interceptor's own reaction mass might be very low indeed. In that case, the pilots would simply transfer themselves back to the ship, leaving their old interceptors to drift away, and be ready to rejoin the battle in backup interceptors already pre-imprinted for them. Shank was worried that one spare interceptor per pilot might not be enough. That wasn't a comforting thought. Not to mention that the business of imprinting a new interceptor meant uncomfortable hours of work in an interceptor that was not yet properly configured to work with her mind.

"Between alert time and imprinting work, you will be pushed pretty hard," Shank said. "You'll have to deal with it, people. However, I want at least five contiguous hours of in-your-humanoid-avatar rest for each of you per twenty hours. Find the time and do it. I want each of you ready to go and sharp as a razor. No excuses.

"OK," continued Shank after a moment, "last point for now; assignment changes. Second Wave. Lersen, that was good work with the simulation. You've definitely earned your rank points for that one. I'm approving your kick up to 'Senior Pilot Officer.' However, I do not want to move you out of Second Wave right now. Got it?"

"Yeah, no problem, sir," Lersen said, a bit of relief in his voice. "I don't want to leave the wave with a fight maybe coming up."

"Good," said Shank. "Glad you understand. Next topic. Wave Leader Handric, what's your assessment of Junior Pilot Officer Neel's performance in the last simulation?"

"She did very well," replied Handric. Zandy tried and failed to hold back a smile. It was very rewarding to have her performance noticed. She was a very junior pilot, after all, with less than twenty thousand hours total in the Fleet since the Academy.

"Good," said Shank. "Have you considered what we discussed after the simulation?"

"Yes sir," said Handric. "I think she can handle it, and I think she will do a good job with it."

"OK," said Shank. "Neel."

"Yessir," said Zandy.

"First off, you've got the hours and the skills, and now, you've got the rank points too. Captain Ari-Kani agrees; that was very good work in the simulation. As of now, you can take the 'junior' off of your rank. Second thing,
Pilot
Officer
Neel, is that I'm putting you in as First Wave's reserve leader."

Shank's image turned to look at Senior Pilot Officer Wimms. "Wimms, you are getting very senior for that slot, and you are also getting sloppy. Take this as your chance to tighten up before you get promoted and get put in a position to get other people killed as well as yourself."

"Commander!" exclaimed Wimms, "I've got seniority and live-combat time!" 

"I know it, Pilot," said Shank. "I'm not reducing your rank points and I'm not knocking your combat time, but you've messed up in both of the last two simulations. Neel, on the other hand, managed to get through enemy defenses, solo, vape an enemy interceptor, damage a second one, and then put two hits on the enemy assault-ship...

"I know, I know," continued Shank, "it was a simulation. Not the real thing. News-flash, Wimms; most of the pilots here have never flown in live-combat. News flash number two; you've only flown in one fight, and that was against a lightly defended target."

"Sir," said Zandy. "Sir, I think Senior Pilot Officer Wimms is right. I'm not asking for this, and I don't have any combat time..."

"Pilot Officer Neel, shut it. I know your record better than you do. You did very well in the simulation. As punishment for a job well done, you get more responsibility. Welcome to the Fleet. You should know the drill by now."

"Yes, sir," said Zandy.

What the fuck does this mean, she thought. I got promoted... promoted! The thought was a triumph, in spite of the worry of the rest of it. But there
was
the rest of it, Zandy thought. He assigned me to second-in-command of the wave... I don't know anything about leading a wave, not really. And now, if Handric buys it or has to go off-line, I have to do it.

At the same time, she could not help feeling a rising wave of pride and energy. Recognition and approval from the other pilots, and from the Interceptor Commander, was heady and sweet.

She might have made an enemy of Wimms, she realized. She hoped not. She liked the senior pilot. But that was out of her hands. She would need to talk to Handric, soon, about what he expected from his reserve wave leader.

I'm going to have to spend every spare hour getting ready, she realized. I'm not going to have enough spare time to blink.

The next hundred-plus hours were as busy as Zandy had expected, and then some. Zandy spent her most restful time in her interceptor, on standby alert. Even that was a sort of prison when the interceptor was stored in its magazine cell. But at least it was a restful ten hours; time to think and plan and go over training programs for her new position as reserve wave leader.

In a way, Zandy loved being in an interceptor; loved
being
an interceptor, since when she inhabited it, the tiny ship was her body.

A ship's interceptor pilots were her first line of defense and attack. They were really just guided missiles, powered by the ship's own main lasers. But they were costly missiles and they could operate at a range where remote control from their ship would induce a fatal light lag. At 300,000 kilometers, anything the interceptors' sensors saw would take a second to reach the mother-ship, and any command sent back would take another second to reach the interceptors. A two second delay would make any guidance useless.

Interceptors could be launched with AI control. But, whether, as some researchers argued, AIs were actually sentient, or whether, as conventional wisdom held, they were just a very clever imitation of sentience, it was clear that, no matter how sophisticated, AIs utterly lacked any sort of intuition or instinct. It might have been different if pilots were forced to interact with their weapons by voice and manual commands, but even biological minds could be interfaced directly with their defenses and weapons; there was no speed advantage for AI controlled weapons. And in a contest between a thinking mind and even the most elaborate autonomous programming, an AI, incapable of improvised or creative responses, almost always lost.

So that left putting a human mind into the interceptor. Not hard to do; a neural network large enough to hold a daemon was small enough to fit into a human skull. A six thousand kilogram interceptor had plenty of room. A biological human pilot could have been crammed in, at the cost of significant payload space, but no biological pilot could have survived the accelerations that interceptors attained under laser-boost.

There was another advantage to having a daemon pilot an interceptor: All too often, an interceptor mission was a suicide mission. The tiny ships really were more like missiles than space-fighters. A daemon stood a good chance of escaping from her manned missile by means of a data-link, transferring back to the launching ship in the instants before an interceptor was destroyed. Daemon pilots allowed interceptors to fight like heedless kamikazes, but without the certain loss of skilled pilots and without the need to indoctrinate skilled pilots to become suicidal.

Which was not to say that piloting an interceptor was safe. Even without combat, the huge accelerations and energies involved made the tiny parasite ships very dangerous. Simply to operate, they had to ride a high energy laser beam that, if mismanaged, could vaporize the tiny ships. An interceptor mission was usually over in less than twenty minutes; an interceptor pilot's statistical average life-span in actual combat time, even allowing for data-link escape for the piloting daemon, was less than an hour. A pilot who survived three combat missions was a hardened veteran. And each battle could see a pilot launched more than once: An assault-ship carried several hundred interceptors in its magazines; a pilot could expect to be yanked from a dying interceptor into a fresh one and launched again if the battle was an extended engagement. In some cases, a pilot might go through three interceptors in one fight.

That was where most of the rest of her time went; Interceptor Commander Shank wanted her to have one more spare interceptor, beyond her primary and backup 'ceptors. That meant pre-imprinting the neural net so that she could seamlessly operate it in combat, so that she could become the interceptor. And that meant spending hours in an unimprinted 'ceptor, running low grade simulations, getting the thing to react and respond to her mind. It was like being forced into a crippled body, twitchy and off-balance, with muted and confused senses. She could only bear about three hours of it at a time, and would transfer back to her own biosim avatar feeling worn out and exhausted.

Pixie helped out as much as she could, but the fact was, hunting for pirates was hard on the interceptor pilots.

---

Hunting for pirates was hard on swift-ship crews, thought Demi-Captain Freya Tralk. Her little
Ice Knife
, together with
Skyrunner
, had made the FTL transit to Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II tethered and docked to the huge assault-ship
Conquering Sun
. That made for an easy FTL transit; no need to coordinate multiple FTL wormholes, and no danger of dispersed emergence points or strained singularity reactors.

That was the only thing that was easy about this mission, though. As soon as the three Hegemonic ships had emerged in the Sigma-Charybdis Waypoint II system,
Ice Knife
and
Skyrunner
had boosted away from the
Conquering Sun
, accelerating at seven gees. The goal was to create as large a distributed sensor array as possible, to look for the hostile ships.

Seven gees was a strain. It was impossible to leave the ship's own neural networks. All of her crew's humanoid avatars had to stay in secure storage.

It had not taken long to find the expanding, cooling debris of the three destroyed freight-liners. But there was no sign of the raiders who had destroyed them.