A silence. Doubt, curiosity, and deep offense. He had his own doubts, of these men Saito called essential and friendly and to be trusted with the truth, these fools who wouldn’t so much as talk to Saito, because Saito wasn’t a command officer and Saito wasn’t in charge.
“This doesn’t agree with our information.”
“I hope I have better news, then, sir. Our crews are keeping schedules, we are bringing our other senior crews, including UDC personnel, up to mission-ready; and when they’re ready they will go. Officially, I know nothing about the upcoming test. I won’t know the time until I’m told. But assuredly it will go. And any media attention to this facility will find everything in operation.”
A modicum of respect, perhaps. A reassessment, a reevaluation what situation they were dealing with, certainly.
“Maybe you’d better explain yourself, lieutenant. With what equipment? With this tape you’ve come up with? Are we brainwashing our crews?”
“Crews at mission ready have to practice daily to maintain those skills. With the damage to the sims, Fleet Command opted to use the Hellburner prototype, patched to the shipboard simulators.”
“When was that authorized?”
“The patch?”
“The shipboard facility. The chamber.”
“Not chambers, sir, nothing like. I’m not privy to the details, but this is equipment we brought with us into the system, that we regularly use. Combat crews on stand-by also have to practice, virtually daily, to keep their edge. We certainly can’t stop a carrier’s operations or use its physical self for exercises. Naturally we have the equipment.”
“Then why in hell haven’t we been using it all along? Why spring it now? Why this whole damned, accident-riddled program?”
“Politics, sir.” He hoped he kept all satisfaction off his face. “As the situation was told to me, we were ordered at the outset, over our captains’ explicit protests, to submit our trainees to the UDC Systems Test protocols, to their aptitude criteria, their rules and their existing equipment during testing of the prototypes. As I believe, there was a major policy battle over that point in the JLC, and we lost.”
Total quiet in the room. The clicking of the aides’ keys had stopped.
“You never said explicitly,” the other senator put in, “that you had the equipment.”
“There was some fear,” Graff said, “that the UDC might use its position to demand control of that equipment. In a situation in which we arc not to this hour solely in control of communications system accesses, in which we’ve had sabotage, attempted murder of our personnel, assignment of flight personnel on criteria purely ideological in nature— plus the security breach—we are trusting your discretion on this point and we trust mere will not be another leak. What we train on is a very dearly held piece of information. If our enemy knows what equipment we have—we are, in the vernacular, screwed. We protested, through every channel we trusted, that the station facilities here are a hundred fifty years old, with maintenance problems that eat up funds for improvements we asked for. The decision to put the rider training into the hands of the UDC, to use Lendler’s data conversion system for the pods in the first place—was as I understand, a purely political decision. We asked to review the software. We were not trusted to make that input. We… were… no/… trusted.”
Another silence. An angry silence on both sides. But it wasn’t productive anger. Graff shifted back in his chair. “I’m not a diplomat. My captain left other officers here who are. But they aren’t command track by UDC rules. So I pass their word on to you. As for the operational crews of all the ships—you gave us a requirement to have carriers on standby to defend this system—and I can tell you with absolute certainty I would be grossly irresponsible to take that carrier’s controls after months of total stand-down. We’re in constant training, all ops crews and staffs are in training during any stand-down; and the UDC has never provided carrier control siras. It’s certainly no secret.”
“Where did you obtain this other equipment?” Anger. Still, a genuine offense, and he answered with careful exactness:
“I haven’t been on that carrier and I honestly don’t know the source.”