Emily’s Personal Journal
On the H.M.S. New Zealand
Alex Rudd is the most sadistic bastard ever born. For the last ten weeks he has beaten the living crap out of every one of us in Tactical School. And after he does it, he sits us down and explains in excruciating detail just how we screwed up. Slow motion replays of every stupid blunder we made. And he has this most annoying mannerism of raising his eyebrows in mock bewilderment and asking, “What were you possibly thinking when you gave that order?”
Now we are in final exams. Or as Rudd puts it, the last chance to have to show just how god awful stupid we really are. We started with twenty trainees; there are ten of us left. We’ve just had one field exercise; one more to go. The exercises are played in real time. Ten of us on the “Blue Team” are in simulators here on the New Zealand, while Rudd and his pack of hyenas are based on the missile cruiser Dublin. The first exercise was a disaster. They picked Laura Salazar to head Blue Team in a mission to guard a fifteen-ship convoy. She kept us in a tight formation to maximize our fire power, but Rudd’s Red Team had split. After three days of constant battle stations, we were all dragging our butts. Then we were attacked simultaneously from two directions. Laura used all of us to attack the larger of the two enemy forces, a calculated risk that we could drive off Red Team by inflicting a massive blow. Bold, but risky. Too damn risky, as it turned out.
So we left the convoy and attacked the larger of the two Red Team groups. Or thought we did. When we got into missile range we discovered most of the “ships” we were attacking were decoys. By the time we got back to the convoy, half of them were Code Omega and the rest had scattered to hell and gone. Blue Team lost two war ships and eight freighters. Red Team lost one ship and a bunch of decoys. Rudd told Laura that she had done quite well for someone who obviously hadn’t given the exercise any serious thought. He was right, of course. Bastard.
Tomorrow we start our second exercise. Supply Station Alamo. Alamo has 50,000 tons of processed ziridium, the entire supply of ziridium for that Sector. Blue Team has ten destroyers and has to protect it. We have hard intelligence that Red Team is sending a large force of ships to seize the supply station or, failing that, to destroy it. They could be here within two days. We have seven days before we can expect reinforcements from Second Fleet.
Rudd told me ten minutes ago that I am in charge of Blue Team.