38

“Sirs.”

“Sit down, Kira,” Admiral Vilma Remington ordered. The gray-eyed commander of the Redward Royal Fleet gestured Kira to a seat in front of her desk, next to John Estanza.

“I assume there will need to be an investigation,” Kira said quietly. “I am prepared to take full responsibility and withdraw from this contract. I…”

She swallowed. She’d lost people before, but rarely in training. In the six hours it had taken her to get her fighter back to the surface and end up in Remington’s office, she’d gone over all of it in her headware.

They’d pushed too hard and two of their pilots had died. That responsibility was hers.

“I was in command of the training exercise and wrote the parameters,” she finally finished. “Someone has to be punished for this.”

“No,” Estanza replied. “No one has to be punished for this, Kira. It was an accident. A shitty, awful, tragic fucking accident that claimed two young women who didn’t deserve to die, yes, but still an accident.”

“We owe it to them.”

“You do not,” Remington said, firmly. “At this point in time, I would prefer not to change up the command structure of the training program. While the RRF cannot force you to complete your contract, we have no intention of releasing you from it, and the break penalties are…significant.”

Kira inhaled sharply and nodded. She could pay those penalties, she was sure, but she hadn’t paid as much attention to them as she should have.

“What do we do?” she finally asked.

“We give the students one day to grieve,” Estanza told her. “Today, the three of us”—he gestured to include Remington—“go over the high level of what happened and how to avoid it. Tomorrow, we go over it with the trainers and we readjust the parameters of the curriculum so we don’t lose people to this particular error again.”

The office was quiet.

“I have researched nova-fighter training programs as best as I can from here,” Remington said after a moment. “Having never flown a fighter myself and working from documentation that is redacted at best, it’s difficult to identify best practices.

“What is not, unfortunately, difficult to realize is that even best-practice training programs lose students. You are training children to handle some of the most powerful hardware in existence on their own. Accidents can and will happen.”

“I’ve never been in charge of an entire training program before,” Kira admitted. “I’ve worked as a trainer but not as one of the two people running the whole damn thing.”

“I have and I’ll remind you that we wrote the training program,” Estanza told her flatly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been hired to train up an entire system’s nova-fighter corps. It is the first time I’ve been asked to do it in sixty days.

“These kids had fifteen days of classroom training and twenty days of simulator training before we put them in nova fighters. That’s a quarter of the time they should have had,” he noted. “We have twenty-five days to put them through mixed training with actual nova-fighter time. They’re not getting the breathing room, the digestion time, anything that they need to really have it all fit together in their heads.”

“We knew this would be a problem when we gave you the timeline,” Remington said. “Bluntly, Commodore Demirci, I expect to lose thirty of those trainees before we’re done. I hate myself for it, but I need those pilots.

“Redward needs those pilots.”

“I…” Kira swallowed. “I hate it, sirs.”

“We all do,” Estanza told her. “So, we do everything we can to minimize the impact.”

He gave himself a full-body shake and leaned forward, studying Kira.

“Now, you saw what happened. What was the biggest mistake we made?”

“We assumed they could do a three-hour patrol as their first flight,” she said instantly. “To you or me, three hours is nothing. We do seven hours in space as a standard non-combat patrol. To these new trainees, kids with no spaceflight experience, just a standard flight is as draining and adrenaline-intensive as full-on combat.

“We’re used to, at worst, training shuttle pilots and gunship pilots to be nova-fighter pilots,” Kira concluded. “They know how to fly and we’re just adjusting their habits and skills to the new hardware. These kids are learning to fly for the first time.

“I think we need to cap them at an hour live flight time per training session for at least the first ten days,” she said. “We’ll ramp up rapidly after that, we only have twenty-five days, but we need to do multiple smaller sessions for that first week and some.”

“If you move the entire training cohort onto Shadow Ward, you can cycle them more quickly and get about the same amount of training as you were planning,” Remington pointed out. “Mix simulator, classroom and live flight training in a single day, rather than having one day of sim and classroom followed by a day of live flight.”

“We can do that, if you’ll give us the space on the Ward,” Estanza agreed. “I’ll miss the penthouse.”

Kira managed a small chuckle. It was somewhat forced, but it was real. She suspected that the pressure of the training program was going to wear down her humor over the remaining days…and it would have been a lot easier with Bueller to support her.

“We’ll make do, sir,” she told Estanza. “I can hope that Shadow Ward’s transient officer quarters are better than some of the places I served Apollo in.”

“You may well be disappointed,” Remington warned. “But we will do what we can.”

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