Chapter Ten
Drill
"Lieutenant Kitan, draw from the Armory 20 PM-44s and issue them to the first 20 people you see, tell them to return to their quarters and await orders. Your Security forces are also to arm themselves."
"What's up?" is Gordon Malloy's unrequested query and the other officers see how little the interruption pleases the shipmaster, but he doesn't slap the pilot down, though to some it seems a near thing indeed.
"Battle simulation. We have been boarded by the Redcoats." There are smiles among those who understand the ancient reference. "The twenty random crew are the only ones who were not injured in the initial battle where the ship fell so they will have no one to help them. They must engage the enemy wherever they find them. Set all weapons to minimum, I want to knock them off their feet, not through bulkheads."
"Sounds great," Gordon says, getting into the moment. "Can I play?"
Mercer looks as though considering the question but the pilot did interrupt. "No. You're already dead. In fact, the whole bridge was taken out."
"Darn it. I was really looking forward to shooting it out."
"I'll shoot you myself."
"Um, no thanks."
"Go, Alara."
xx
In short order Kitan has assembled both her Security force, the aforementioned Redcoats, gathered them in the Launching Bay and given them their orders. She notes that there is a man who has been linked in her files with a woman from the Quartermaster's whom she'd been sure to give a weapon. The conscripted volunteers for now wait in their quarters for the alert to sound and for them to be the ship's sole defenders.
She hopes they shoot each other.
xxx
"Kitan to the Bridge," the woman calls over the communicator in the left sleeve of her black with red piping shirt. "Invasion force has landed and penetrated the ship's hull at Deck Five Shuttle Bay. It is dispersing to attack."
"Attention all Surviving Crew. The ship has been boarded on Deck Five. Repel bo –." He turns off the intercom and the ship's bright lights are reduced to one quarter, the corridors illuminated mostly by the Red Alert indicators in the bulkheads.
xx
The conflict, such as it is, is over in nineteen minutes. Final score: one attacker wounded, all twenty defenders dead.
"That was Pa – thetic!" Mercer announces. "Who was defending us anyway?"
"Seven civilians," Kitan says, "consisting of four scientists, two students and the schoolteacher and a corps of equally random crewmen."
This is outrageous. "We are charging into a possible enemy attack on Lunar Base 4, unless we are very lucky to make it before anything happens, and you give me school children to defend this ship?"
"You said the first twenty I see."
Mercer halts. That had been his order. "All right, collect the weapons. We'll do it again. And we'll keep doing it until we get it right. Commander," he looks to Grayson, "join me in my office. Let's review this last debacle and see if we can find a better strategy."
xx
Thirty seven minutes later the tally is different. This time none of the invading force is wounded and everybody on the bridge is relieved - for the moment - by the Captain's absence.
xx
A total of eight exercises are run and the grand total is disheartening: Seven invaders wounded over the course of the day shift, none killed while one hundred sixty defenders had been mowed down.
On the bridge Lt. Cmdr. Bortus is in the center starboard seat, but the interest is on the most recent concluded contest and the fact that the invading force had made short work of the defenders, much to the Captain's displeasure. He has ordered another round with changed 'volunteers'.
As they await Round 9 Gordon has his own summary of the day's exercises: "We're getting out asses handed to us."
"What can you expect?" Kitan challenges. "Civilians against my teams?"
"These people are the best the Union has to offer."
"Which is saying little enough."
"I'm feeling kind of disappointed," Louisa Sportelli admits. "I for one thought we could do better. The Captain is mad enough to chew neutronium. Did you see his face on that last ship wide, I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel."
"Letting that go for now," Gordon says, also wanting to let go of a very familiar, if accurate, reference, "I think we'd be lucky to get to Lunar Base 4 before we run out of crew."
"Amen."
"You know, I thought for sure yesterday that nothing could drag the Captain (he'll call his old friend 'the captain' until Sportelli proves herself one of the guys for the free-flowing banter that can be the norm aboard this bridge) anywhere near that Summit."
"Why?"
"A couple thousand Presidents, Regents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Queens and what have you spending a week talking about this, that and the other thing? It'll probably take a day just to get through the Opening Ceremonies. Talk about Pompous Circumstances. But he's actually enthusiastic to swing back, and like this: 'Loaded for bear', 'pop in and blow something to shit', I've never heard him talk like that."
"Perhaps," Bortus' voice cuts through, "you would prefer to find a course that will get the Captain there more directly."
"Yes, sir," he says and both officers lock their attentions on the boards before them. The ship is already flashing toward Earth in as near a straight line as is possible while avoiding cosmic detritus and other potential hazards. He recognizes the chastisement as Bortuseze for Mercer's more prosaic 'cut the crap'.
x
Kitan, at her usurped station, will report this exchange later.
It had been hoped, at least by the Dastarn, that the drills would distract the crew from considering the oddity of their mission and asking questions. She'd thought it was a shortsighted hope
xxx
"All right," Grayson doesn't quite confront her superior but in the privacy of his office after attack #9 but it's a near thing. "We've proven that Planetary Union people, with the exception of specially trained officers, can't fight for shit. We weren't planning on fighting any of them so what does all this prove?"
"Nothing. I'm keeping them too busy to question our plan."
xxx
And that ambition carried through over the next several hours. After Mercer called a halt to the 'pathetic claptrap' of defending the ship, the final three hours of Alpha shift dealt the crew another challenge. An explosion in Engineering caused a score of injuries ranging from concussive force to radiation poisoning which the crew had to deal with without the resources of Sick Bay.
In this the men and women of the Orville acquitted themselves better, as these are the sort of things that spacefarers are trained to contest with.
Mercer's declaration was that tomorrow there would be more assaults by hostile forces.
Perhaps he'd make it interesting and conflict the alien races as a whole against the human defenders. He doesn't care a whit that the pilot had organized a pool and that odds were running high against the non-humans.