The weirdness didn’t stop after our visit at Fleet Station-Calmaru. I managed to get some sleep before I was required to be back on shift and when I had breakfast, for me, in the mess, I learned some interesting information. Apparently, the constant drills of the last week wouldn’t continue, instead things were back to normal. The other cadets were mostly relieved about that, the drills had been straining, even if we had learned a great deal and return to normal was appreciated.

After breakfast, I went down into flight-country both to report and to be ready if something happened, I knew we would currently be moving away from Breadbasket and its gravity-well, to some place where we could jump into hyperspace without gravity causing navigation-problems. When I got to flight-country, I talked some shop with a couple of technicians, still trying to learn as much from them as I could, when I noticed that the other pilots were gathering in the briefing room. Not sure if I had missed something or what was going on, I excused myself and joined them. The mood inside was strange, the older pilots looking as if they knew what was going on but weren’t telling.

Sitting there, reading on my tablet, I received a message from the Commodore about a squad-briefing and that we were supposed to gather in the meeting room at the start of our shift. I was already there but the late message just added to my confusion, normally, such meetings would be scheduled well in advance. Nonetheless, the Commodore entered soon after I got the message, looking unhappy as he glanced at the gathered pilots, nodding after a short count that would have told him that everyone was here.

“Some of you might have heard that the intense training we have done last week will not be continued. That is true, in so far it relates to the rest of the ship but for Carmine-Squadron, we will continue to fly simulated drills as a squadron, to make sure everyone of us is as sharp and ready for what might come as possible. During the last war, the Starfighter-command had around 60% loss during the first battles of the war, if there is another war, I want Carmine-Squadron to have no pilot-losses at all. To accomplish that, we will train.” he paused, his gaze panning over the gathered pilots and I noticed that, for the first time, he looked his relatively advanced age.

“Remember pilots, it is your life that is on the line. So, Train like you fight and fight like you train.” he finished, quoting the Academy’s motto, bringing a grim smile to my face. It also made me wonder just what had been told to the higher-ups that they had made such a sudden change in vector, from intense training, scaling back to basic readiness, obviously over the objections of Commodore Ryker. But he was giving us our orders and I was quite happy to follow them. While the simulator-sessions we had last week hadn’t been geared towards training specifically me, they had made me into a better pilot and that was always good. If the sessions continued, I might be able to graduate the Academy as best pilot of my class and that was an honour I certainly would like to have.

The Commodore spoke a few more minutes about the required times of readiness, mostly during emergence from hyperspace, he not only wanted a group to be in the tubes but have the second group ready to follow without delay so we would have to pre-flight our Starfighters, essentially having them ready to launch, even if it wasn’t our rotation to be in the tubes. Additional work, not only for us pilots but also for the technicians that maintained our fighters without whom we would quickly be in trouble.

It was a step up from the normal procedures but it wasn’t a major effort, compared to the intense training we had been subject to before. After that, he ended the briefing, telling us he would see us in the simulator. I had to smile at that, his style of simulator-training was somehow more enjoyable than the training in the academy and during the maneuver-critiques, there was more of a collective effort, not just an instructor telling you what you had done wrong and what the correct, read - textbook, way to handle a given situation was. It had been during one of those that I had been told to continue using nicknames, not rank, as there was no rank when it came to making mistakes. Commodore Ryker himself had told me that, if I noticed him making a mistake during a simulation I was supposed to bring it up during the critique so it could be discussed. That was another part I liked, mistakes were not judged by the simple question if it was according to the standard response-pattern but we could explain why we had done a specific maneuver, it reflected the changing nature of Starfighter-Combat.

But, while I preferred the Squadron’s way of doing simulator-training, I could easily see why the Academy did their training the way they did, it gave all Federation-pilots a baseline of responses that was common amongst them all and allowed new pilots to integrate into existing squadrons without weeks of additional training to bring them up to speed on an individual squadron’s procedures. Even with Carmine-Squadron’s extensive playbook of formations and patterns I had only needed a few days of explanations and training to learn them, as they were all ultimately based on the basics learned at the Academy.

I noticed that the new scenarios we were using had changed a little from the week before, not so much in difficulty, they were still brutally hard and deadly, but instead of obviously being targeted at a possible, renewed war with the Tellurians, it was now back to hunting pirates and protecting convoys from them. The first scenario was quite similar to what we had been doing while I had been trained before the unfortunate events in system F-347, the Merathorn coming out of hyperspace, noticing a few heavy freighters being harried by unidentified contacts and us going out to put an end to it.

The scenario went roughly as I would have expected even if I was a little confused why the pirates had military hardware only a generation out of date. They were flying Falcons, the predecessor of the Raptor, we were using and to make things interesting, there were twelve of them, with two frigates to keep us on our toes. During the simulation, I idly wondered just why Starfighters were named after predatory birds from old earth, most of which had been extinct for hundreds, sometimes over a thousand, years. Maybe, over the years they simply had run out of ideas and were periodically re-using old names, just to keep pilots from giving them nicknames of their own. Which, most likely, was for the best.

The simulation went roughly as I would have expected, the programmed pirates were good but the two groups of Carmine-Squadron managed to deal with them, Commodore Ryker subtly maneuvering us in a way that allowed us to suddenly switch to a frigate, ramming our antimatter-torpedos down its throat, shattering it into subatomic particles in a spectacular detonation. It had been a massive overkill, each Starfighter firing two torpedos, combining enough firepower to destroy the frigate ten times over. With the frigate out of the way, it had turned into hunting down the rest as they tried to disengage. I managed to get through the simulation with minor damage, but when we were done, I realised that we had lost three pilots and the rest of us would all need maintenance.

Still, there was more than half the wing remaining and the simulated Merathorn had survived, even if it had been damaged by the second frigate. Compared to the simulated massacres of the last week, it was massive progress.

Pirates were an unfortunate reality of our time and a curious one. After the first set of simulations we had a break, allowing us to use the head and relax a little, mostly so we would remain sharp for further simulations.

During that time, I asked Commander Siloh how Space-Piracy worked. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a group using military hardware worth a few million Federation Marks was using that hardware to raid shipping. How did they make a profit and, maybe just as important, where did they get their supplies. It wasn’t as if you could walk into some corner-shop and get the parts to maintain a Starfighter’s plasma-cannon, nevermind the heavier weapons mounted on full-sized Starships. Her response had taken a while, turning into a mix between history-lesson and political rant but it had been quite interesting and enlightening.

Officially, the various mega-corporations in the Federation were peacefully competing with each other but, according to her, reality was vastly different. At some point, some creative executive had realised that, if he wasn’t able to make their product more competitive, they would have to turn their competitors product less competitive. Simple, right?

What were the best ways to make a competitor less competitive? Raise their prices, add problems to their shipping, cause delays, all great ways and so simple to accomplish. You just had to recruit a couple of mercenaries, misappropriate a shipment of military hardware or two and turn them in the right direction. The returns of their raiding would finance them for the future and the fact that they needed supplies only you could get them kept them chained to their parent-corporation. At least in theory.

In reality, it had taken a few years for those business-practices to spread, with every mega-corporation having their own pirate-contacts which, coincidentally, gave the Federation Starfleet something to do, a mission that made them buy more hardware from some mega-corps.

Over time, the reigns on those originally tightly bound pirates loosened and, according to Siloh, there were stations hidden in some systems where they could fence the goods they stole and buy supplies, with unscrupulous merchants shifting the stolen goods back into circulation, sometimes selling them to the original recipient for a mark-up. Losses were often carried by insurance-companies, who made even more money for the mega-corps, causing the shipping-companies to stop trying to fight the pirates, instead simply dropping their cargo, which apparently made the Space-pirates a lot less cut-throat than their name suggested.

In my opinion, it was madness but who was I to tell the Federation that something was rotten in the system. I was still shaking my head when Commodore Ryker ended our break, sending us back into the simulators to face difficult odds. At least they weren’t impossible anymore, unlike last week.