Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman-
Pacing the commandant’s office, as Commander Jenkins grinned at me, was proving fruitless in relieving my stress. “She did what?” I asked again as if the answer would change based on my stress.
“She broke the Kobayashi punitive training scenario. We didn’t have anything bigger than a titan coded, and it’s hardwired to be realistic… Even the heaviest rift breaks in history have never had anything bigger than a titan, you can’t even find anything bigger unless you head out into intergalactic space, and what’s out there would make even a Chaos lord scrot themselves.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. It takes a full battle line to deal with a tyrant alone, a titan? The last titan that was defeated was during the height of the empire. Are you sure she didn’t cheat? It is kind of a tradition for the tech guys to find a way to gimmick the software itself.”
Mike shook his head. “Nope. I checked over the specs myself. Everything she did was completely within her tech affinity as an adept and skill training, she’s just… incredibly fast at improvising. She’s been in the scenario more than most, and knew about the graveyard, and hit it before she even had to take the first planet killer. Admittedly it’s just a simulation, and probably impossible in real life, but by the time she had polished off the titan, she had a flotilla of shipkillers, over two hundred...uhh… cannibal builder SI drones rebuilding her munitions, and six battle drones I wouldn’t hesitate to label mega-dreadnoughts, using the planet killer's shells as hulls.”
Mike chuckled, “She also custom-designed the dreadnought SI coding on the fly… she sent one of them, an over-engined hulk, on a long course to slingshot around the sun, using basically a billion tons of metal as a makeshift missile against the Titan at near-relativistic velocities. Honestly, she called in, confused, when nothing else spawned… We didn’t have a victory condition because we have never needed one for the simulation.”
“I told her that she did reasonably well, joining the long list of graduates to crash the simulation with that stunt, sorry, but we didn’t need her to get a swelled head. People are watching.”
I nodded. “Look, it’s not that I mind her doing the impossible, or getting credit for it, it’s just that… if this scrot gets out, even to the lower admiralty, it’s going to be completely impossible to protect her. Even if we keep her affinities under wraps, well, the rest of the class has a 400% efficiency increase over average, and I cannot help but think she’s part of it. When she gets to a ship, she’s going to be under the microscope, and if she pulls this kind of scrot before we are ready, that’s it… the game is over.”
Mike grinned, “Exactly, that’s why she isn’t going to a normal ship, and neither are you.”
“What do you mean, sir?” I asked very casually, trying to hide my glare.
He laughed, “Don’t you dare sir me. If you’d accepted OCS when you had the chance, you’d probably be sector chief right now. After graduation, you get a week to report to the UPFFS CROW, after she’s had a chance to settle in.”
“UPFFS? A Privateer?”
He shook his head, “You know better than that. It’s a tier 7 light drone carrier that’s in the dockyard for refitting after changing commands from the captain’s mother. That spotter I told you about? He was from the Crow, and his boss, the former commander of the Crow, pulled strings to get her here.”
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“But… a civilian ship?”
“No, a privately contracted warship. The Captain is commissioned reserve, even if the ship herself isn’t. We can trust her to keep her mouth shut until it’s a done deal, and I think she hopes to shift our current policy back to Imperial standards, when the fleet was tasked with protecting the skies, and the delving and rifting was done by private concerns to keep things balanced.”
“The admiralty hates the idea, after all, it takes power directly out of their hands, but right now we are LOSING. We have lost 12 worlds in the last two years, and only recovered eight of them after the damage was done, of course… and without private contractors, we can’t protect what we have.”
“The biggest problem is the whole draft program. The slaver worlds are always ready to sell us their surplus, but the free worlds resist, and with the amount that the fleet is forced to drain just to protect the worlds and enforce conscription, and the fact that true heroes are pretty much mired in regulations instead of encouraged to go do what they do, We simply don’t have the people or resources.”
Mike slowly shook his head, “The greatest potential leaders are spending their time as rebels, fighting against conscription and the UPF instead of leaning into the fight against the Chaos lords. Planets like Korse are the exception, Dave… most conscripts are literally the dregs, the trash that cannot find a better job, and the idiots that get caught up in easily avoided sweeps. You know a system hero that enjoys their job can do more than a million meats in boots.”
I nodded slowly, “You noticed that she was having a blast when we threw her into those unwinnable scenarios, huh?”
Commander Jenkins laughed, “Yeah. It’s amazing how simultaneously crafty and naive she is. She found and adulterated all of the biomonitors, but ignored the camera that was staring directly through the glass into the simulator cockpit, recording every grin, cheer, giggle, and snicker when she thought she had me fooled.”
I shrugged, “She’s really good at dealing with the tech and sorcery tools, but it’s like… eyeballs and old analogs just blow right past her like she cannot even imagine someone just watching her. That’s what I am really worried about. It’s a huge blind spot.”
He nodded, “That’s exactly why I am happy to get her on the Crow, and why you are getting assigned to their security forces. No conscripts and most of the crew other than the troopers are civilian contractors. They know to keep their mouths shut. The ship plays cleanup for the fleet, and also handles stuff like tyrants that can rip a line fleet apart.”
“They take tyrants? Why haven’t I heard of them?”
Mike shrugged, “Most of their stuff is kept in-house. Light drone carriers are pretty rare because they are considered worthless against stuff like planet killers that the line has to keep a lookout for. It’s also magitech 7, which we can’t even keep in parts… they get paid contributions, but the mechanical upkeep is entirely on their own heads. The fleet doesn’t like to admit that the contractors can pull more than their own weight because it makes the worlds question the fleet’s necessity and their income flow.”
“The same rules apply. Keep her alive and on her toes. You are on detached duty. The crow has two spiritualists besides her, both adept-level, plus the XO is an empath and a tier 7 implant bay… this might be the opportunity you are looking for to get your tune-up taken care of since they regularly raid spaceborne rifts… the XO is a taer and sharp as a surgical laser. I already have your orders cut, and now it’s just up to Brandt and Michaelson to give out their final tests.”
“Seriously, Dave, I don’t have to tell you how important this is. She can potentially take out Titans, and you will need to keep her safe in rifts so she can build her base effectively. I still want you to try and avoid bonding her, but the Crow’s XO has some pull and if it happens, will likely shield you from the fallout to some extent.”
I nodded, the mission was still very much active and had no time limit and nebulous victory conditions, which was worrisome. Almost no quests were given out anymore, and I’d only had a single one when I first became a paladin, which opened the class. I still remembered the wording and had thought of it as a silly quest… begin the path of the paladin, and the reward was helping to save the galaxy.
I wasn’t telling anyone about it. Quests were private, especially since they could sometimes expose you to information you didn’t want to know like finding out your best friend worked for the mercenary cartel that helped supply the slaver worlds with unmodded humans. Even 15 years later, the memory of getting in a kill-or-be-killed battle with him cut me like a knife.