Fleet Action (wc-3) William Forstchen (fox in socks read aloud .txt) 📖

"It's nuts, I tell you. Anyone who talks about preparedness, about keeping the fleet appropriations up, is denounced as a war monger."

"And just how is the fleet?" Tolwyn asked.

"Four fleet carriers are still on line.

"Just four?"

"It's worse. Two of them are drydocked at the moment but it's claimed they can be brought back up to operational status within thirty days.

"What about the others?"

"In drydock, reactors pulled, crews on extended leave."

"What the hell for?"

Banbridge sighed.

"Jamison convinced the President, and he convinced the Senate, that if the Kilrathi were going to make a move we'd have plenty of warning and she pointed out that all but six of the Kilrathi carriers had been put into inactive reserve as well. So as a cost cutting measure the carriers were pulled in for major refitting and overhaul. Getting them on line could take up to three months."

"God help us," Tolwyn whispered, draining his glass and then accepting a refill.

"Forty-eight percent of the rest of the ships of the fleet are still on line, the rest are skeleton crewed in reserve. Operationally we're losing our edge. Flight training time for the fighters has been cut by nearly half, even our main battle fleet ships still in active service, our heavy cruisers, are tied off with crews on leave. It'd take weeks, maybe a month to two months to even get one full Task Force Group organized and back on line.

"What's worse is the freeze on construction. We should have had a new fleet carrier and four more cruisers operational by now and a number of other ships started. We tried to get through a government decree requiring all shipyard works to stay on their jobs; that caused a hell of an uproar and some of our best technicians are quitting to look for work else where. Key war industries, which during hostilities were forbidden to strike, are now having walkouts with people wanting higher wages, made worse by what looks like an economic depression due to a freeze on new defense contracts.

"Morale is down in the gutter. The career people are sore as hell. They wanted this thing seen through to the finish. Most of our old line people know that this war won't really be over till we storm through the rubble of the imperial palace and raise the Confederation flag. Anything else is a prelude to defeat. The reservists and draftees on the other hand are all clamoring to get discharged. Hell, senators are getting flooded with letters from parents, wives, and even our own troops demanding demobilization, the old 'bring the boys and girls back home.'"

"I guess it's kind of hard to blame them when you think of it. To them it really does look like it's over."

Banbridge nodded.

"I tell you, Geoff, I think a democratic republic is the only way to run the show; you English are the ones who really invented it and then we Americans picked it up. But there's always been one flaw in it and that is the sustaining of a long-term war. It's hard at times for civilians to truly understand the military; we have a thousand year tradition of always being at odds with the civilians we're sworn to defend. The military at times gets turned into the Greek messenger who gets blamed for simply telling people the truth of how the universe works. People get too caught up in the wish for peace and forget that the law of the jungle is still the law in most parts of this universe, and they don't like it when we try to tell them differently.

"Got any suggestions on how to change it?"

Banbridge smiled and shook his head.

"It's what I've spent forty-three years in the service fighting to defend. No, it's got its problems but I'd keep it.

"That's if it survives one year longer. Don't people realize what the Cats are up to?"

"Oh, a hell of a lot of ordinary people do, especially in the outer planets and the frontier. They've lived on the real edge of the war, sometimes in the middle of it. They know what even a momentary slip of vigilance can do. But the inner system of planets, and especially Earth, have been bearing the financial burden of a war that's been fought several hundred light years and a dozen or more jump points away, I think they're willing to grab at anything if it'll mean peace. We've got an entire generation that's been born and come to adulthood knowing nothing but war played out nightly on the holo screen, and the ruinous taxes to support it; to them peace is a dream as powerful as any narcotic."

"And it just might kill them."

Banbridge sighed

"The damn media is part of the problem. The Kilrathi have done a masterful job of feeding them selected footage of furball planets bombarded in the war, tearful interviews with widows who ask for peace, the usual propaganda crap. But try and send our own crews in to film freely and the curtain gets slammed down. It seems to be really popular of late, especially on the college campuses, to buy Jukaga's line that the war was a conspiracy of their military and ours to make themselves powerful and big industry rich. The majority of people see through it, but there's enough out there buying what ever they see on the holo to make things a bit hot.

"But enough on that, fill me in on what's happened with you over the last two months."

As Geoff described his arrangement of ship transfers to the Landreich and the mission into Kilrathi space with the D-5 team Banbridge remained silent, sipping on his port and refilling Geoff's glass when it went dry.

"When I got back to Landreich, that's when things started to get dicey with Kruger."

"How so?"

"He's absolutely furious with the Confed and the blockage of the fighter shipment. At least they were getting a trickle during the war, but the peace commission has shut off any further shipments of war-related supplies.

"I