Chief Warrant Officer Davi Renko had nineteen students and a simulator that froze every forty minutes.
The Academy in Crucible Anchorage was six months old, bolted to a flat asteroid on the northern rim between the Mining Station and a Defense Platform that had seen better days. Two classrooms, a briefing room, a simulator bay with eight pods, and quarters for twenty cadets and three instructors. Renko was the only instructor who had actually been in combat. The other two had transferred from a training facility on Mars that had closed when the funding was redirected to fleet operations. They taught navigation and logistics. Renko taught everything else.
"Today is energy management," he said.
The nineteen faces in front of him were young in a way that made his knees ache. Not young in years. Several were older than Renko had been when he'd first shipped out. Young in the way that people are young when they've never heard the sound of atmosphere venting through a hull breach. Clean uniforms, clean hands, notebooks open, styluses ready.
"Every ship in the fleet runs on finite reactor reserves. Your reactor produces a fixed output. Your systems consume that output. Weapons, shields, propulsion, sensors, life support. When total consumption exceeds production, something goes dark. Your job as a bridge officer is to make sure the thing that goes dark is the thing you can live without."
He pulled up the simulator display. A schematic of a cruiser, the reactor at the center, energy distribution lines running to every system like arteries.
"You have four operational protocols available on a cruiser. Power to Shields diverts reactor output to shield regeneration. Power to Weapons increases rate of fire and turret tracking speed. Emergency Repair deploys automated repair drones to damaged systems. Overcharge Weapons dumps your entire reactor reserve into a single devastating salvo. Each one draws from the same reserves. Use Power to Shields, your weapons slow down. Use Power to Weapons, your shields thin out. Activate Emergency Repair, and everything else takes a cut."
A hand went up. Cadet Yun, from the second row. She'd scored highest on the entrance assessments.
"Chief, the manual says optimal shield regen allocation is sixty percent reactor output. Is that the standard we should target?"
"The manual is correct. Sixty percent gives you sustainable regen against sustained fire from anything up to a Heavy Cruiser. The manual was also written by someone sitting in an office on Ceres who has never had an ORI cruiser's shield generator shot off at fifteen hundred meters."
Silence. Renko let it sit for a moment.
"When your shield generator takes a kinetic round through the housing and your regen drops to thirty-eight percent baseline, sixty percent allocation doesn't mean anything. You're not managing a system anymore. You're deciding which part of your ship dies first."
He switched the display to a tactical scenario. Two ships, one friendly, one hostile, closing at combat speed.
"Hardpoint targeting. Who can tell me what it is?"
Three hands. Renko pointed at Cadet Morrow, back row, the one who never volunteered but always had the right answer when called on.
"Directing weapons fire at a specific subsystem on the enemy ship instead of general hull targeting. Engines, weapons arrays, shield generators, sensor packages, Jump Drive housing."
"Correct. Why do it?"
"Because destroying a subsystem can remove a capability. Take out their engines, they can't maneuver. Take out their Jump Drive, they can't retreat. Take out their shield generators..." Morrow paused. "They become vulnerable to hull damage at a much lower volume of fire."
"Good. Now tell me when not to do it."
Morrow hesitated. This wasn't in the manual.
"When you don't have time," Renko said. "Targeting a specific hardpoint requires sustained fire on a precise area of the enemy hull. If you're in a close engagement with multiple hostiles, the three seconds you spend trying to hit an engine housing is three seconds you're not putting general damage on the ship that's about to kill you. Hardpoint targeting is a luxury. You use it when you have positional advantage, numerical advantage, or time. If you have none of those, you shoot center mass and hope your guns are bigger than theirs."
He ran the simulation. The two ships closed, exchanged fire, the friendly ship targeting the hostile's engine hardpoint. The simulation tracked hit probability, damage distribution, time to disable. The numbers were clean, precise, theoretical.
"In the simulator, hardpoint targeting works sixty-two percent of the time at optimal range. In combat, the number is closer to forty. Your hands shake. The enemy maneuvers. Your own ship takes a hit and the deck lurches and your firing solution drifts. The forty percent is what you train for. The sixty percent is what the manual promises. Remember the difference."
He moved to the next module. Defensive protocols.
"Evasive Maneuvers. When do you use it?"
Cadet Yun again. "When under heavy fire and shields are failing. The ship increases thrust randomization and reduces its target profile."
"When do you not use it?"
"When you need to maintain a firing solution. Evasive Maneuvers degrades your own accuracy by roughly thirty percent."
"Correct. So you have a choice. Take less damage, or deal more damage. The answer depends on whether you're winning or losing. If you're winning, you don't evade, you press. If you're losing, you evade and you look for the exit. The problem is figuring out which one you are."
He looked at the nineteen faces. They were taking notes. Styluses moving, heads down, recording every word as if the words were the thing that would save them. Renko had seen cadets like this before, on his first deployment, fresh from the Academy on Vesta, notebooks full, eyes bright. Most of them had been fine. Some of them had frozen the first time a ship fired at them, and no amount of notes had unfrozen them.
"Fortress Mode. Battleships and Dreadnoughts only. The ship anchors in place, all propulsion power redirected to weapons and shields. Effective range nearly doubles. You become the most dangerous thing in the Gravity Well and the easiest thing to hit. Who can tell me when a commander activates Fortress Mode?"
Silence. Then Morrow.
"When they've decided not to leave."
Renko looked at him for a long moment. "That's the best answer I've heard in six months."
He shut down the display and leaned against the console. The classroom was quiet except for the hum of the environmental system and the faint vibration of the Mining Station's extraction equipment transmitting through the asteroid's rock.
"I'm going to tell you something that's not in any manual. The reactor reserves on your ship are a number. The protocols are buttons. The hardpoints are coordinates. All of it is data, and data is clean, and clean things make sense. You will train on the simulators and you will learn the optimal allocations and the correct responses and the textbook sequences for every scenario we can program."
He straightened up.
"Then you will ship out, and your first engagement will happen faster than any simulation, and louder, and the displays will show you things that don't match any scenario you trained for, and someone on the comms will be shouting something you can't understand because the ship just took a hit that knocked out the audio filters. And in that moment, the only thing that will matter is whether the training is in your hands or only in your notebook."
He tapped the simulator console. The pods along the wall hummed to life.
"Pod assignments are on the board. Today's scenario is a three-on-two engagement against NEC cruisers with superior shield regeneration. Your objective is to neutralize the enemy's shield generators before their regen outpaces your damage output. You have eight minutes. The pods will freeze at minute six because this facility was built by the lowest bidder, and when they freeze you will restart them and continue."
Cadet Yun raised her hand.
"Chief, what happens if we can't neutralize the generators in time?"
"Then you learn what it feels like to lose." He gestured toward the pods. "Which is the second most important thing I can teach you."
Morrow was already walking toward Pod 3. Renko watched him go, then sat down at the instructor console and pulled up the monitoring feeds. Nineteen simulations running in parallel. Nineteen cadets about to learn the distance between theory and a ship that's shooting back.
The simulator in Pod 5 froze at minute four. Renko noted the time. Getting worse.
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