"How about emergency procedures and safety?" Brett wanted to know. "Have you been able to cover that?"
He shrugged. "We've mostly been focusing on basic operations. We touched on safety a bit just as a natural course of that but as far as emergency procedure, we've hardly started."
Brett nodded. That was about par for the course on this particular ship. They were attempting to crew the Owl with less than half of its normal complement and well over three-quarters of those soon-to-be-overworked crewmembers had never been aboard a naval vessel before. Brett had interviewed each one of them personally before allowing them aboard his ship. About the only thing that they were strong in was enthusiasm. He knew that they desperately needed more training time but he also knew that time was of the essence in this particular mission. The WestHem marines were going to be shoving off from Earth any day now and if the Mermaid wanted to be waiting for them as they came around the sun they would have to leave today.
"Do what you can, Mike," Brett said. "I'm forced to have utmost faith in you."
"The drills will continue until we achieve something like efficiency," Mike promised. "I'll keep them awake day and night."
He smiled his approval at this and then turned to his weapons officer. "Chad, how are things going on your end? Will your people accidentally blow us up with those nukes or what?"
Mike was a twenty-nine-year-old nuclear technician at Farmington Laboratories, the semi-private, semi-government operated facility that produced all nuclear material and weaponry. With his doctorate in physics, he was the best educated of the crew, indeed of most Martians in general. "Well," he said, "we got those new detonators and guidance packages installed without blowing anything up." He chuckled a little. "Who knows? The odds are better than even that the things will even work when we fire them."
Brett, who was experiencing stress unlike anything he'd ever imagined before, didn't find this remark all that funny. "I trust that the actual odds of the weapons working as they're supposed to is a little higher than that," he said, his voice somewhat icy. "I'd hate to travel all the way inside the orbit of Mercury, sneak into a WestHem naval formation, and then fire off a torpedo only to have it fail."
Mike's face grew more serious. "They'll work, Brett," he assured him. "And my people will be tip-top at their jobs by the time we get out there. I promise."
Brett offered a strained smile. "As with Mike," he said, "I'm forced to take you at your word. I'll get us to the WestHems. You make sure those nukes do what they're supposed to when we get there."
The pre-launch briefing continued for another ten minutes, with Brett asking for status reports from the rest of the newly frocked officers under his command. In each case the story was pretty much the same as Mike's and Chad's. Their men (and women - more than a quarter of the enlisted personnel were female) were eager to learn, eager to fight, but still quite lacking in a complete understanding of their jobs. Training would need to be intensive and frantic on the three-week trip to the interception point.
"Sleep is going to have to be a luxury on this voyage," Brett told them. "I want full training rotations for all departments covering every conceivable operation on this ship. I want every person on board cross-trained in at least two other department's responsibilities. And then there are the damage control and firefighting drills. Those will need to be fit in there somewhere as well. And that's not even to mention the general quarters assignments and training. We'll be working on that one at least twice a day, maybe more depending on how much they suck at it."
His officers looked at him solemnly, none of them speaking but most of them nodding in agreement at his words.
"Okay then," Brett said. "We have our consumables loaded and stowed, our propellant tanks full, our reactors turning and ready to burn. What do you say we get this thing moving? Get everyone to his or her stations. I want to leave this dock in two hours."
Thirty-two thousand kilometers away, in a high equatorial orbit of the planet, the Marlin, an Owl under control of WestHem, drifted silently, her engines on idle, her maneuvering thrusters quiet. Marlin had been the ship that had been heading home from the Jupiter system when the revolt had occurred. On orders from Admiral Jules she had taken up position where her crew could surreptitiously keep an eye on the events taking place on Mars. As she slowly orbited around in an elongated arc her sensors alternately recorded the radio transmissions and infrared signals from Triad on the outbound leg and the Martian surface cities on the other side. She was now in a direct line of sight to Triad and the huge naval base. Less than twenty minutes before Commander William Warren, her captain, had sent off a secured, encrypted transmission to Jupiter, where it would in turn be relayed to Earth, regarded the primary course of concern: the pre-positioned marine landing ships. They were still safely in dock, their tanks and weapons and fuel still presumably aboard.
Commander Warren, strapped lightly into the captain's chair on the bridge to keep from floating upward in the zero gravity condition, yawned and stretched his arms, more than a little bored with this assignment, particularly since they had already been out in space for more than four months. Morale among the crew was strained to say the least, a fact that was augmented by the strict rationing of their remaining consumables. And they were also short fifteen crewmembers, mostly the cleaning and cooking staff. Those fifteen had been the Martians on the crew and they had all been confined to their quarters under guard for the duration of the mission. As such, the meager meals that were produced with the dwindling rations were now tasteless as paste and the halls and storerooms of the ship were now cluttered with debris.
"John," Warren said to Lieutenant Commander Lovington, his executive officer, "do you think you can handle the shots of Libby on the next orbit? I need to go to my cabin for a bit and meditate." By which he meant that he was going to masturbate to stored pornographic pictures on his computer terminal and then take a nap.
"Sure, cap," said Lovington, who was perhaps the most frustrated person on board. After all, it was he that was in charge of dealing with the crew problems. The numbing routine of spying on their own possession coupled with the knowledge that they would not be relieved for more than six weeks had caused more than its share of fights over petty matters. "Are we running the full spectrum on the MPG base there again?"
"As always," Warren told him. "We have to see how our little greenie friends are playing with their toys, don't we?"
"Of course," he said with a sigh. Making tapes of the MPG units going through training rotations for the upcoming confrontation was a major part of what they had been tasked to do. Admittedly the greenies were taking to this with gusto. But one could only watch so many tiny infrared signatures of tank and armored cav units driving around the Martian wastelands before one was driven utterly batshit by it.
Warren was just about to unbuckle when Spacer Second Class Pebley, who was manning one of the tracking centers, suddenly spoke up. "Captain," he said slowly. "I think there's something going on at the naval base."
Warren looked at him in irritation. "Something going on?" he asked. "What do you mean?"
"Well," Pebley said cautiously, his tone that of one who is not quite sure weather he believes what he is seeing or not, "I'm getting what looks like maneuvering thruster activity from the docking area where the Owls are being stored."