The Lotus Eaters

UEPF Spirit of Peace, Lunar Starship Holding and Storage Area

High Admiral Marguerite Wallenstein stood in the light. There was minimal gravity in this chamber, perhaps fifteen percent of Earth normal. She held onto a rail with one hand. In the simulation room, Richard, Earl of Care, sat in the silent darkness of a virtual reality helmet that completely enclosed his head. Moreover, he sat on a complex gimbaled chair. Wallenstein hit a button, beginning the disaster response program called, for reasons lost to antiquity, the "Kobayashi Maru."

* * *

The exercise was supposed to be disconcerting. Some very fine minds, psychologists' minds, had gone into making it so, back in the days when the Peace Fleet had mattered to more than a few.

It began with sensory deprivation. All sound was cut off by the helmet. The comparative lack of gravity made the command chair, and the straps that held Richard to it, something less than real. The stars, or, rather, their images, swirled before his eyes, making it seem as if he were tumbling, end over end, lost and alone. Richard felt nausea begin to rise. He tried to focus on one star alone, in an effort to keep the nausea at bay. It didn't work; they were clustered too close together to blot out the rest.

A voice began to drone in Richard's ears, explaining the situation. He knew he was supposed to pay close attention but with his rising gorge he was barely able to make out the general scenario.

He did catch a few things, ". . . first ship to transit . . . new star system . . . disaster . . . no relief or rescue possible . . ."

It was sufficient for the program that Richard's vital signs show nausea. It wasn't strictly necessary that he actually vomit. Accordingly, as soon as he'd reached the necessary threshold, the stars cut out, being replaced by lifelike images of the bridge crew—rather, A bridge crew from sometime back in the Twenty-third century—going about their daily business. Past the bridge crew were several viewing screens. In one of them Saturn receded in the distance. Various well-lit diagrams of his ship stood spaced along the walls.

Richard felt the tiniest shudder in his command chair, even as the images likewise moved slightly in his view. He didn't notice it, but several sections of the diagram changed color subtly.

One of the female crew clasped a hand to one ear. "Captain," she announced, "meteoroid strike amidships. Belts fifty-eight through sixty, decks . . . Zulu through . . . Victor report minor air loss."

Richard hesitated for a moment, the nausea was still with him.

The crewwoman asked, "Shall I seal off the affected sections, Captain? Shall I dispatch damage control?"

Fuck me to tears, Richard thought. The High Admiral will have my ass for lunch for that.

"Aye, away damage control parties to the area of the penetration." Richard took a quick glance at the diagram. "Negative on sealing the area."

"Aye, aye, sir. Damage control parties away."

"Casualties?" Richard asked.

"None reported, Captain."

* * *

"Skipper, this is Damage Control Alfa. We've found the hull breach. Sealing it now."

"How large is the breach?" Richard asked.

"Two millimeters, no more," the program answered. "We've leaked a little air but nothing dangerous."

Richard turned his head toward life support, the VR helmet changing scene with the turn. "How do we stand on reserve oxygen?"

"Reserve storage is more than adequate to compensate for the loss, Captain," the program answered, in a man's voice. It then added, "Carbon dioxide filtration and separation continues without degradation."

* * *

Okay. Well enough, thought Marguerite. The boy didn't overreact. Of course, he hasn't yet asked the right questions . . .

* * *

His command chair definitely shuddered. And this time it was non-trivial.

"Meteoroid strike, Captain," the same female simulacrum said. "Stern, belts ninety-four through ninety-seven, it has passed through all decks. Captain, there are casualties. The ship has taken on a four mil yaw."

Fuck.

"Damage control?" Richard asked.

"Aye, Damage Control here, Skipper. I've dispatched a team."

"Good," Richard said, then asked of the female bridge crewwoman, "Can we get visual on the damaged sections?"

"On screen now, Skipper."

Apparently power was at least partly out in the most recently struck section. The cameras had to operate off of light enhancement. This was perhaps just as well as the first image the viewscreen caught was of the remains of a crewman, sliced in two and then explosively decompressed. Parts of his torso had gone fairly flat while his inner organs floated outside. The two pieces of the late crewman rotated, one clockwise, the other counter. The grainy green image was at least some insulation from what would, in living color, probably have been another nausea inducing experience.

"Skipper," Damage Control added, "we're not going to be able to get in there until that team suits up."

"How long?" Richard asked.

"Be at least a quarter of an hour," Damage Control answered.

At least the strike wasn't near either of the reactors, the captain thought.

* * *

And you still haven't asked the right question. Tsk.

For a moment Marguerite contemplated giving the boy a hint. But, no, let him figure it out for himself.

* * *

"Meteoroid strike, Captain. Deck seventy-four, belt X-ray, compartment one-eleven. External cameras show it slicing the hull but not entering the ship. No casualties."

"Elder gods, where in the Hell are they coming from?"

* * *

"Bingo," Marguerite said aloud. In his VR helmet there was no chance of Richard hearing. "That was the right question."

* * *

"I've got nothing forward, Captain," the crewwoman answered. "Nothing on radar, lidar or visual."

"Then look behind," Richard commanded.

The simulation was good enough for the crewwoman's face to acquire an expression of horror. She turned back away and began manipulating the controls in front of her. A flip of the switch, just before she faced back toward Richard, changed the viewscreen from slowly orbiting entrails to an outline of the ship. The diagram shrank in scale until a cloud of something appeared on the lower right side of the screen. A dotted line, marked with time hacks, showed the ship's course. Another showed the course of the meteoroid cloud. They intersected.

"I ran back the orientation of the spinning decks in time, Captain. All three strikes came from the direction of that cloud."

The simulated crewwoman turned again back toward her panel and the viewscreen. She exclaimed aloud, with a strong note of panic, "Lord Buddha, we're going to die!"

* * *

The program could be used both with or without a human moderator. It was preferred to use such a moderator, because machine intelligence had never proved worth a damn in analyzing or reacting to the nuances of human emotion, or the speech which either moderated it or exacerbated it. A human might get it wrong; a machine was certain to.

Wallenstein listened very carefully to every syllable Richard uttered.

"Calm down," she heard Richard snap. "Give me some options."

Not bad, Marguerite thought. Sure, he's got a little fear in his own voice. If it were completely absent that would scare me—or any sensible member of the crew—more, since that would mean he was an idiot. Not bad.

* * *

"I'm sorry, Captain," the simulated crewwoman said. Subtle hints—the drape of shoulders, the angle of heads, and the few expressions he could see—told Richard he'd said approximately the right thing.

" 'Options,' I said." Richard paused for a moment and then added, "Think before you give them to me. In the interim, sound Red Alert, General Quarters, and Don Suits."

A siren wailed through the notional ship. Lights flashed. The simulacra on the bridge began reaching into nearby compartments and pulling on their emergency suits. These were unarmored but would at least keep air in. The computer could not simulate Richard putting on a suit, but, after a short period of time, changed his image to show the outlines of a clear facemask even while the VR suit pressurized in places to simulate the feel of a emergency suit.

The chair shuddered once again, then began to spin. Even though the image painted on Richard's eyes stayed approximately the same, barring only that several crewmembers who were still unstrapped while putting on their suits were thrown violently across the bridge, the combination of spin and unchanging view rekindled his nausea.

Fuck. "Where was that?" he demanded.

"We've lost the mast, sir, though the sail's hanging on by the stays! Medical team to the bridge!"

There was another shudder in the chair, followed by spinning in the vertical plane.

"Another strike amidships, Captain!

How many more of these? Richard wondered. That sparked another thought.

"Activate the alternative bridge. XO to the alternate bridge. XO to the alternate bridge."

"I've got some options for you, Captain," Operations said. "But they're not good options."

Life support announced, "Captain, that last strike missed Reactor Number Two, but it's taken out the cooling system."

"Captain, we've just rotated into the remains of the mast."

"Captain, sick bay has taken a hit."

"Captain, inspection shows the keel tube is bent and rotation of exterior decks must halt. She's ripping herself apart, Skipper."

At that the gimbaled chair began a purely random rotation, even as the speakers in the helmet began to blare out the sounds of screeching metal and composites, being torn apart.

"Option One, skipper, is to . . ."

* * *

Disasters were coming at him fast and furious now, with still new disasters springing up from old ones. Was there an urgent repair that needed to be made? Was one of the Damage Control teams annihilated? Why, oh why, didn't I have them suit up after the first hit? Reactor overheating? I should have ordered one of them shut down to reduce the chances of a critical hit. Worse, some of his regrets were mutually exclusive or contradictory. Power outages? Thank the elder gods I kept both reactors going; what if I'd shut down Number One?

Richard was simply too busy at the moment to suspect the truth, that the simulation program was designed to keep him behind the command power curve, to throw him decisions and disasters faster than he could keep up with them, however quickly and even however wisely he might have decided, to do so the faster, the faster he moved.

In the end, it didn't matter what he did. Reactor Number Two went critical and, next thing, he found himself once again slowly spinning, alone with the simulated stars.

This time, right into his helmet, he did vomit.

* * *

Wallenstein wrinkled her nose at the vile aroma arising from the helmet as she removed it from Richard's head.

She pushed it as far from her nose as she could, then carried it to a stand against one wall. There she picked up a towel which she carried back and handed to Richard.

"Actually, you didn't do badly," she said.

He answered, while wiping his face with the towel, "I lost my ship."

"Everyone loses his ship," she assured him. "Everyone. That's not the point."

"Then what is the point?" he asked, dropping the foul towel.

"To see who panics, who turns into a gibbering monkey, who becomes abusive. On those grounds, you did pretty well."

"Not well enough to be worthy of actually commanding the ship."

Again, Richard's basic decency, so rare in a natural born Class One, and humility, which was much rarer, struck her.

"You will be," she assured him. Moreover, she was surprised to discover, she believed it was true. And that's important, not least because I'm not going to have time to hold your hand once I get back and have to deal with that idiot, Battaglia.