2953-08-06 – Tales from the Service: The Bad Luck of Rookies
While it is only too common military suspicion that the greenest member of any unit is usually the first to get hit, it is a lesser known but also widely belived pseudo-certainty that the missions that go wrong the most often are those described as the most routine.
These are, statistically speaking, only artifacts of human confirmation bias, but such superstitions have plagued military service across the centuries.
One of our recent submissions is at the critical nexus of both of these beliefs – the greenest squadron in the fleet being sent to cut their teeth on the most routine live-fire mission anyone could think of. The results – abject disaster – will be predictable to every Navy officer and rating in the fleet. Statistically speaking, this sort of surprise is uncommon. Most green units are put through several low intensity live fire missions before they are trusted with properly dangerous work.
Unfortunately, statistics only go so far. When you spin the randomizer enough times, it’s going to come up with the improbable values once in a while. This is the story of a few strike crew who happened to be there when the improbable but widely anticipated result happened.
Isha Nagarkar’s first combat operation was supposed to be routine. It wasn’t supposed to be the sort of op likely to result in gunship losses. Unfortunately, that hadn’t proved to be the case.
She should have been concerned when the briefing materials had stressed the simplicity and low anticipated opposition of the mission. Most of her freshly formed squadron, was totally green, except for the officers, so command had put them on low intensity in-system patrols at Sagittarius Gate to get comfortable with their brand-new off the line Magpie 2-E gunships.
They’d been familiarizing only a couple weeks when transfer orders had their whole outfit moved off their home orbital installation and onto Trafalgar, replacing a veteran squadron that had been in the line so long they were still using Magpie 1-Bs. The carrier was a prestigious posting for a new squadron, even though its decades-old hangar was barely large enough to operate Magpies. With that ship, they were certain to meet the enemy soon.
Soon had turned out to be a little less than a month into operating from Trafalgar. There had been several readiness alerts before that, hours and hours of nervous waiting or fitful dozing in the ready-room waiting to be scrambled. When the real thing came, though, it was a simple hit and run raid on a small listening post in a nameless, planet-less star system a few dozen ly from Sagittarius Gate.
Such outposts, unmanned or manned by only a handful of spacers, were, at least according to the briefing, rarely well defended; there was no point in investing valuable point defense batteries, big guns, targeting systems, squadrons, and all the personnel to crew them into such posts which could never be reinforced or relieved in time. Stealth and rapidity of deployment was the main shield of the enemy’s forward listening posts; for every one Seventh Fleet detected and extirpated, two or three went undetected, quietly monitoring star drive activity in the area and even deploying star-drive equipped scout drones to monitor activity in Sagittarius Gate itself.
Unfortunately, this one had been somewhat better defended than usual. Point defense lasers had flashed out as soon as the squadron was committed to its first strafing run, and a half-dozen Coronach interceptors had appeared out of nowhere as they circled around for another pass, two of their number already damaged.
A full squadron of twelve new Magpies, even with the greenest of crews, would have normally been able to fend off such a weak counterattack relatively easily, but almost the moment the turret railguns had begun buzzing, one of the damaged Magpies had exploded, when the Coronachs were still not close enough to use their plasma lances.
Isha never heard their other attacker identified. Its second shot cripped another Magpie, and its third had torn the guts out of hers. There had been a shriek of tearing metal, then a flash, and then the gunship had ejected its three crew. Rather than exploding, it tumbled powerless, its shattered innards glowing cherry red. Isha had a good view of it for several minutes before it dwindled into the darkness.
The battle moved past the trio rather quickly, leaving them in silence. Their flight suit radios had the range to talk to each other, and enough of both computing power and thruster reaction mass to keep them from drifting apart, but beyond that, all they could do was leave their beacons on and hope one of the rescue cutters from Trafalgar would be along to get them shortly. They’d all heard the veterans muttering about Incarnation ships also knowing how to follow these beacons to pick up stranded pilots, but hopefully there wasn’t much chance of that in a battle for such a remote outpost.
Theoretically, every strike crewman was tested for agoraphobia. Isha, who’d spent her young adulthood before the war in and out of an EVA suit working for her father’s shipbreaking firm, was not particularly unnerved by the cold black in all directions, but Blackwood, her portside gunner, was on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and his increasingly frantic tone over the comms circuit were beginning to grate on Isha’s nerves, and on the nerves of the starboard gunner, Rios.
“Are you sure we’ve got two days of air?” Blackwood’s voice quavered. “I've only got one spare atmo cartridge. Aren’t I supposed to have two?”
“Blackwood, the new suits use a larger cartridge. Each one is good for 24 hours.” Rios’s low bass carried a warning tone. “So you have one in the slot, and one spare in your ejection harness.”
“But what if one of them is bad? Sometimes they aren’t-”
“Then you still have at least one full day. And if we’re going to be picked up, it’ll be a lot sooner than that.” Isha sighed, though after disengaging her pickup, trying to remember that not everyone had been a spacer before joining the service. “Just relax and enjoy the view. You’ll never see the stars better, unless we lose another ship.”
The big black was, in its own way, beautiful. Isha still remembered what it had been like to go out with her father that first time, at only six years old, to drift to the end of their tether and stargaze. The starfield had lost some of its wonder for her since then, but none of its primeval beauty. Every moment, her eyes seemed to pick out a colorful cluster or a haze of nebula she hadn’t seen before, fading in dimmer and dimmer ranks back into the vast distances of the Sagittarius Arm.
“What if we aren’t picked up?”
“Then all that hyperventilating you’re doing is going to ensure you’re the first one of us to suffocate.”
Rios’s observation, though technically true, was rather unkind, and he probably knew that when he said it. Blackwood’s voice went up an octave, and he started rambling on about how unreasonable it was to expect pilots to just sit and wait to be picked up, and how the Navy really should have a better solution for the crew of destroyed strike rigs that didn’t leave so much to chance.
What exactly the engineers could do to make someone like Blackstone comfortable with ejecting from a stricken craft, was not explained. Isha didn’t bother to speculate, since it was clear her compatriot wasn’t actually thinking, he was just whining. With a sigh, she used a puff of her suit thrusters to rotate herself a little bit to see a new swath of stars, and then turned down the radio volume.
