Supplanted

The next three months I (and everyone else who farmed) spent farming. The rainy season had begun and harvests were coming fast and plentiful. At the end of three months, my unit began “on call” duty; six weeks late, but that was our new patrol schedule.

A shuttle was stationed at a centralized location beside the road to town and loaded with the gear of all of the pilots assigned to it who lived in the surrounding area. Our carrier then launched into synchronous planetary orbit with a skeleton crew, fully loaded with fighters and provisions. In the event of an actual alert, at a minute’s notice, I and my local fellow pilots would board the shuttle and launch into space to join the carrier in battle. Our on call duty passed uneventfully and we were called to active duty.

Without giving away any classified military secrets, I’ll outline some of the military tactics used for the preparation and patrolling of our sector that we practiced for the benefit of the reading posterity. In other words, this is what we did on active duty. I won’t be giving actual facts and figures, so don’t expect the numbers to make any sense.

Patrols are usually three to four months long, depending on the amount of enemy activity in the sector during that time frame. They overlap so as to maximize defensive capabilities while minimizing vulnerability. Four to six carriers are launched to patrol (active duty) while two to four carriers – from opposite sides of the planet – are launched into geo-synchronous orbit to act as reinforcements (On call duty). Fighter pilots who are farmers stay planet bound during their on call hours to continue their vital food production duties. Any ship’s personnel who are not employed in other vital areas of war support while on the ground man the carriers in space; that means very few people.

During on call duty, all carrier support ship pilots and crews are also aboard ships in space at all times. Only the command staff officers are allowed to shift their duties so that at least one senior officer is aboard a ship when it is in orbit. In all, a skeleton crew mans each carrier while the bulk of us wait tensely planet side for something to happen.

The farms are run by farming robots during our absences. Farm-bots aren’t as efficient as humans, but they get the jobs done that need to be done and we can all come home to neat and still productive – if not maximum efficient – farmland when we return from our tours of duty. Sometimes, some of us don’t come home. Just some perspective; we are, after all, at war.

Our new leadership cut patrol tours in half, both in number of ships and the time durations that they were active, with a one week “turn around” schedule that left us virtually unprotected while patrols took a full week to relieve each other instead of overlapping. Now, all ships coming off patrol returned at once while idiotic ceremonies were performed to welcome them back as well as to see their replacements off.

The patrol areas were also cut in half. This greatly angered and scared everyone involved. The reasons given were all political doubletalk, so none of us politically ignorant grunts could muster the guts to argue with them.

With only half the space to patrol and half the time to do it in, we quickly found ourselves bored to tears just pacing back and forth over the same small areas of space while we waited for the enemy to realize our vulnerability and wipe us out; strange how that didn’t happen right away.

In addition to the cuts in time and patrol space, ammunition, fuel, rations and everything else necessary to sustain a carrier in space for any effective length of time were also cut in half. Our Admiral, Ben Bowen, had the foresight to fully load our carrier by using my name to wrangle the necessary provisions. It had occurred to him rather quickly that having the best friend of the new commanding General aboard could be useful. He wasn’t greedy, mind you, but he did commandeer a fresh load of strawberries for the entire crew that would last us until our return. Good man our Admiral. Too bad he couldn’t manage a matching cadre of cream.

With little more to do than pass the time waiting for something to happen, (an attack, namely) the crew eventually fell upon the possibility that peace was indeed about to break out. Many conversations in the mess hall began with the observation that our enemy had failed to attack us at all in the past six months. Perhaps that was a sign that they were about as sick of this constant warring as we were.

“I think it’s a good sign,” Bill Hollis told us. He was an Ensign aboard the carrier Wild Man. “When the enemy fails to attack you when you’re most vulnerable, it’s a good sign that he doesn’t want to fight anymore.”

The consensus around the table nodded its agreement. Several “You’re right” and “Can’t argue with that” statements and the like sounded around the room. I didn’t respond. Not because of my new rank of Major, but because I really didn’t feel the same deep down in my gut.

I left the first positive mess hall banter that I’d ever heard and headed for my fighter. My shift wasn’t for two more hours, but I had a bad feeling in my aforementioned gut that all these happy thoughts of peace were bound to end badly. I walked unchallenged to the launch hatch where my fighter was attached to the exterior of the carrier, made my pre-flight, took a full load of fuel cube, casually moved to launch position in the cockpit and shot out into space.

It’s the quiet that hits you first. Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum. In an insulated environment, such as the cockpit of my fighter, the only sounds are the faint hums of engines that travel through the fuselage and reverberate through the seat and the constant pulsation of blood through the vessels in your ears. I learned all of that in flight school. We still observed radio silence on our fighter patrols.

I flew within sight distance of the carrier – as per our new orders – until I was bored with that (in about two minutes). I decided to risk an excursion. Mind you, our new orders prohibit normal patrol activities like flying to maximum distance from the carrier in search of enemy ships, but I decided that my relationship to the new commander would insulate me from the adverse noise my actions would generate. A faint radio signal acknowledged my digression. Faint because we were under orders to . . . well . . . I don’t know what the order was, but radio contact with patrolling fighters was on minimum for that reason.

“Major?” the radio asked.

“Yes?” I responded.

“Going somewhere?”

“Out.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

I recognized Evans as the radio operator. I don’t know his first name, everyone always calls him Evans. Even his rank escapes me at the moment. I like Evans, he knows better than to question any one of us who gets an inkling of doing something outside of the norm. It may or may not surprise my readers that, on deep patrols, military protocols are rarely followed by the book. More than once, a pilot out on a whim has saved our collective necks by following a gut feeling and stumbling onto an enemy threat. I often pondered the possibility that recklessness was the source of more heroic acts than mindfulness. I was pondering that thought now.

My extraneous patrol found nothing. All was quiet on the gamma front.

It may be of interest to posterity at this point to relate the state of the art space-nar devices that we employ. Built on the concepts of radar and sonar, space-nar uses quantum particle readings to navigate and find enemies in space. I’m not too clear on the details, but, since sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, and radio waves are easily detected by our enemy, somebody somehow devised a way to shoot smaller than atom particles off of objects in space and back into a collector/reader that acted similarly to radar, but was undetectable and far more accurate.

The system also reads “currents” in space. Somehow, don’t ask me how, objects traveling through space stir up ethers that our space-nar can read. That way, we can detect ships coming at us well in advance by the wakes they create in space. Sort of by the Doppler Effect, whatever that is, I only remember the term from a briefing in training school, mainly because we all made fun of the wording afterward. The complete concept is outlined, or, rather, detailed in one of my long neglected text books left over from that same indoctrination training and now was getting dusty on a shelf at home.

I returned to the carrier and attended my debriefing. Debriefing in this case was a chewing out. I got an earful from the Admiral about following orders. He delivered what I can only describe as a prepared speech, since he’d done it a thousand times before and only half agreed with the military premise underlying it. He spoke quickly and in a monotone as he reminded me (for the unnumbered time) that orders are the blah, blah, blah; and we all must, this, that, the other; the sake of, hem, haw; military protocol and all that rubbish; dot, dot, dot, for the sake of morale or some such nonsense; threat of marks on permanent record, etc. He ended with his customary, “Got that?” To which I gave the customary reply of, “Yes, sir. Won’t happen again.” And we both went our separate ways out of the briefing room with the full knowledge that nothing had been accomplished.

It is necessary to note at this time that Admiral Bowen’s path took him to the bridge where he himself ignored the standing order to return to base at the prescribed time and decided single-mindedly that the Wild Man would remain on patrol for an extra ten days. I could only imagine the chewing out that he was going to receive for such a breech of protocol.

A trip to the mess hall, an insufficient shower and a short nap ended my daily routine. If days existed in space, that is. If I had dreamed that night/day, it would have been about the possibility of peace. My waking nightmare would put an end to that.