The Captain surveys the command deck, his ears aching with the clamour of hundreds of phones ringing all at once. The clanging chimes are ever-present on a battle barge of this calibre, and he has grown as used to it as a man can get, but during battle the jarring score reaches a calamitous crescendo that is sustained for hours, driving a thumping headache even into the most jaded veterans. His personal phones, all sixteen of them, are all rattling on their sets and chiming urgent alarms, and he is ignoring them in favour of monitoring the radar on the flickering green screen before him and reading the confusing mess of positional data spat out by a stuttering machine. The phones connect to the various stations of the barge. Engineering, weapons, crew. All clamouring for attention. Asking for information. Requisitioning resources. Wheels all purporting to be the squeakiest. Half a captain’s job is knowing which calls to pick up, which to ignore, and which to send to the officers staffing the command deck around him. At his age, he made liberal use of the latter solution.
Fighting an air war is mostly about taking in, processing, and understanding as much information as a human brain can handle. He watches the two dimensional mess of dots on the radar screen and makes a mental attachment to the navigational codes on the reams of paper being belched onto the desk, marrying the small symbols and numbers to create a three dimensional vision of the dozens of ships outside the bulkhead trying to blow each other up. He could open the armoured shutters of the windows and look, but most of what he’d see would be cloud, smoke trails, and the zip of fast movers. Nothing as useful as the swirling dance of parts he can picture with his decades of experience.
The larger ships, both allied and enemy, have all maintained a healthy distance while they barrage each other with long ranged artillery and missiles. A battle barge of this size must rely upon allied picket ships to blast out enemy ordinance from the sky with flack first, it’s own flack guns second, and it's heavy armour third. But before all that, it can rely on good positioning to never get shot at in the first place. The enemy destroyers are kept at bay by allied cruisers, and enemy fast movers haven’t a hope of making it past the wall of flack or the barge’s own flights of fighters.
But there is a miniscule cluster of dots heading towards the ship, guarded by a wing of larger enemy fighters and a frigate. Even when the escort is forced away by allied fire, the little dots slip the gap and even break past a wall of flack. Too slow to be missiles. Too small to be fighters. In a minute, barring some lucky shots from his own flack guns, they will impact the battle barge. But he’s confident that these quick, small objects won’t explode on the hull, but rather drill into it, and deliver an altogether more deadly payload.
He picks up the red phone on the desk in front of him, the only one that is silent. He dials a number.
‘Aye, sir,’ says the answering voice.
‘Marine Sergeant,’ says the Captain. ‘Prepare for guests.’
Paddy Dobson
12th September 2022