Shrimp in a Whale Fight (1)
After fifty grueling days, you’ve all worked hard. Tomorrow’s a holiday, so today let’s eat, drink, and be merry.
At the declaration from Meirin, commander of the First Battalion in the Third Fleet, the Fourth Battalion’s Bastien and the Fifth Battalion’s Irene savored their first real taste of freedom in what felt like ages and promptly drained their glasses.
“Haa… I can’t even remember the last time I had a drink. Only now does it truly sink in that the operation is over.”
At Irene’s deeply moved tone, Meirin and Bastien voiced their hearty agreement and kept the drinks flowing.
A few simple snacks sat on the table, but they never touched them—as though there wasn’t even room for food amid all the drinking.
During the fifty-day asteroid-belt search operation they had occasionally enjoyed tasty special meals using whatever ingredients they had brought along, yet not a single drop of alcohol had passed their lips the entire time.
“But is the Second Recon Battalion Commander not joining us?” Irene asked, indicating the empty chair. Bastien shook his head with a regretful expression.
“He originally planned to come, but…”
“I heard the Chief of Staff demanded the combat report be submitted by today without fail.” Meirin’s barbed tone made Irene’s face twist in disbelief.
“After everything they went through, is that really something to say to someone who just returned today?”
As Irene tossed out her incredulous remark, the table’s conversation swiftly turned to gossip about the Chief of Staff.
“Typical of someone who’s never actually operated a ship.”
“From what I hear, the Second Recon Battalion Commander even collapsed. A preliminary report must have gone up. They should have a general grasp of the situation, so couldn’t they at least let her rest a day or two?”
Just as in any gathering of people, even the dazzlingly advanced Federation was never free of conflict. The most overt friction within the Federation Space Force was the long-standing rivalry between staff officers and ship captains. It had begun with the dawn of the Mana Engine era and had continued for nearly three hundred years.
The heart of the dispute lay in admiral promotion requirements. One of the nearly mandatory conditions for rising to admiral or higher was prior service as a ship captain at the battalion-commander level or above.
Before the Mana Engine era, flotilla commanders—who led the smallest unit capable of defending a star system or invading an enemy one—were usually promoted from staff positions, especially the operations branch.
But once the Mana Engine era arrived, fatal shortcomings began to appear among flotilla commanders promoted from staff backgrounds. Their ability to manage the condition of the captains actually leading the ships was woefully inadequate.
In large-scale engagements between flotilla-level fleets, they could not accurately gauge the burden placed on those captains. Main ships were lost in absurd fashion, front lines collapsed, and such disasters multiplied.
So the Federation experimentally promoted a handful of captains with actual ship-handling experience who also possessed outstanding command ability. When given proper staff support, the fleets operated with a flexibility that was simply incomparable to before.
Admirals from staff backgrounds tried to study ship operation and mana circuits in order to hold onto their positions, but theory was still only theory.
Even if one considered only the most critical variables—ship output, the captain’s mana sensitivity, the captain’s physical stamina, the durability of the captain’s mana circuit, the enemy captain’s mana sensitivity—there were too many to count on one hand. Controlling all of them through theory alone was impossible.
Admirals who had operated ships for decades could predict, after only a few main-gun exchanges, how the battle lines would shift, which vessels needed immediate relief, or whether the enemy was concealing their true strength. Staff-origin admirals could not. In some cases they could not even understand afterward why the engagement had unfolded the way it had.
The change had occurred because battles between vessels with fixed weapon outputs and fixed hull durability had become contests that hinged on individual capability.
Consequently, aside from the extremely rare staff officers who had mastered theory beyond perfection and could coordinate entire fronts, the vast majority of modern admirals came from captain backgrounds.
That was why, for hundreds of years, staff officers and ship captains had been locked in a snarling stalemate, neither able to swallow the other. In truth it was closer to the staff officers—who had lost their former dominance—being the ones to pick fights unilaterally.
Most likely the reason Freesia could not attend this gathering and was instead writing a tear-soaked report on the bridge was the inflexible Chief of Staff who insisted on enforcing regulations to the letter.
“The more I think about it, the more absurd it becomes. That man originally suggested twenty-four-hour precision scanning, didn’t he?”
Irene, who had already emptied her third glass, slammed it down with a loud clack and recounted the incident from the operation briefing. Dissatisfaction flooded both Meirin’s and Bastien’s faces.
Twenty-four-hour precision scanning? Even when they split the load among several company commanders and worked thirteen-hour shifts, they had barely endured by rotating rest periods. Had they truly tried to maintain it around the clock, most of the fleet would likely have become inoperable midway.
“The flotilla commander properly shut that down. Twenty-four hours was an utterly unreasonable demand.”
Once the alcohol had settled in his stomach, hunger seemed to strike. Bastien popped a neatly sliced piece of peach into his mouth, then brought up the unbelievable rumor he had overheard at the military port earlier. Fortunately, someone who could verify the story was sitting right here.
“I heard that the Second Recon Battalion Commander didn’t rest a single day throughout the entire asteroid-belt search. Is that actually true?”
Is this man drunk already after only a few glasses? Irene wore a dumbfounded expression.
Even they, commanding five companies apiece, had been unable to last a full month without taking a day or two off. A recon battalion commander responsible for only three companies going more than forty days without a single day of rest? Nonsense. Even Lieutenant Colonel Marius of the First Recon Battalion—who was probably sound asleep in his quarters right now—collapsed once every two weeks. Above all, even Meirin had only managed thirty-four days before needing a break.
“Come on, is the Second Recon Battalion Commander’s body made of machinery? How could any person do that? She probably just stopped by the bridge out of diligence even on her rest days and the story got twisted.”
Anyone with even a little ship-handling experience would immediately recognize how absurd the claim was. But Bastien’s gaze, which seemed to ask for the truth, ignored Irene’s reaction entirely. Meirin emptied her remaining half-glass and nodded.
“It’s true. Lieutenant Colonel Vermilion didn’t rest a single day during the search. She intended to take a break on the forty-eighth day, but they happened to discover pirates that very day. She ended up fighting a battle instead of resting. That’s why she only had one daily entry.”
When Meirin calmly stated the facts, Irene could only open and close her mouth at the unbelievable truth. She had thought Bastien must be drunk when he first mentioned it, but with Meirin—who had received daily command reports as the officer in overall charge of the search—confirming it so definitively, the wild rumor turned out to be fact.
She didn’t know what to say. Was it really possible to endure forty-seven days while maintaining precision scanning?
Irene thought back to when she herself had collapsed after only a few days and clicked her tongue. But the shock of a sudden realization hit her a moment later.
“Wait a minute. Then the Second Recon Battalion Commander, after being worked that brutally, is now writing reports without even being allowed to rest?”
Forty-seven days of continuous precision scanning without a break, finally about to rest only to be thrown into a fleet battle, one day of rest, then after salvaging the pirate ship and returning, immediately back to paperwork. The word “crazy” rose unbidden. Of course, she meant the Chief of Staff was crazy, not Freesia.
No. He was not some clueless novice; for a Chief of Staff to treat a newly appointed battalion commander who had returned after such overwork this way—what kind of behavior was that?
Yet their dissatisfaction could only emerge as grumbling around this table. The military was a rank-based society. No matter how much lieutenant colonels complained, they could not interfere with a colonel’s decisions.
If the order had been truly unfair it would be different, but the Chief of Staff was simply applying the rules in an extremely principled, one might even say stubbornly inflexible, manner.
What could the battalion commanders achieve by protesting? He was merely insisting on following regulations.
“I heard he failed the third admiral promotion review last time,” Bastien said, sharing what he had overheard in passing. Everyone’s brows furrowed.
If Bastien’s words were true, it meant the man had missed his final chance at admiral and was now taking it out on the captain positions that had long been an eyesore to him. His path to admiral might be blocked, but plenty of other posts still offered promotion opportunities. So what on earth was he doing?
“Let’s drop this topic. It will only ruin the mood and nothing will change. Besides, Lieutenant Colonel Vermilion won’t be completely unable to join us. From what I hear, she nearly finished the report before they salvaged the captured pirate ship.”
The more they heard, the more impressive this junior seemed. After being worked to the point of collapse, with the flotilla commander implicitly granting an extra day of rest through the holiday, she had still managed to wrap up her report work in the meantime.
“Isn’t the Second Recon Battalion Commander thirty-four this year? Thinking about it again, it really is extraordinary.”
“Her mana sensitivity and combat command are certainly outstanding, but it seems her experience is still lacking. When I asked her what ‘kneading’ meant, I believe I broke into a cold sweat for the first time in a long while.”
Everyone chuckled at Bastien’s remark. They could laugh about it now, but back then they had all broken into cold sweats.
“That can’t be helped. Really, considering her age, she should still be a captain or just newly promoted to major.”
“Indeed, I was a captain at that age too. Still, didn’t Colonel Freesia rise rather quickly?”
At Irene’s question Meirin shook her head. Of course she herself had been a fast-promotion case, but not as fast as Freesia.
“I was promoted to lieutenant colonel at thirty-seven. But my situation and Lieutenant Colonel Vermilion’s are a little different.”
Meirin had excelled in multiple areas, resulting in an overall fast promotion speed. Commissioned at twenty-three, promoted to first lieutenant at twenty-four, to captain at twenty-seven. After five years as captain she became a major at thirty-two, then lieutenant colonel at thirty-seven. Now, at forty-five, she stood on the verge of colonel. While the promotions had been quick, she had learned everything required at each rank and accumulated proper experience along the way.
Freesia, however, had taken a completely different path. The same up to commissioning at twenty-three and first lieutenant at twenty-four, but she reached captain at twenty-nine, then earned promotion to major in only three years by annihilating a small pirate band. Of course, Freesia had been delighted by the rapid advancement at the time, but the problem came afterward.
At thirty-two, the newly promoted major Freesia was assigned to the border region with the Holy Theocracy. There she was swept into a massive war involving the collision of no fewer than six flotillas. Desperately struggling to survive in a war unlike anything she had experienced before, the conflict ended before she knew it—and Freesia found herself first in line for lieutenant-colonel promotion.
Thus becoming a lieutenant colonel at thirty-four, Freesia—armed with her enormous mana sensitivity and hard-won combat experience—now possessed tactical and command skills that could rival any lieutenant colonel in the Federation. The price, however, was that she had learned virtually nothing about administrative duties.
The moment Freesia’s promotion to lieutenant colonel was confirmed, Tachyon had crammed as much theory into her as possible during his limited free time. But without practical experience, her struggles were inevitable.
“The promotion path is rather unique. Realistically speaking, it means her practical experience stopped at the third-year captain level.”
At the horrifying thought Irene shook her head vigorously. What had she been doing during her own third year as captain? Whatever it was, if someone told her to command a battalion with only that much experience… she would have called them crazy.