((Victory, pilots ready room))

One of the flight leaders of the Immortals and a senior Aerospace Traffic Controller came walking in, discussing a launch sequence, or so Patch surmised.

“Hey Patch come here, you’re a plank holder as far as this ship’s small craft section goes. We just got preliminary ops orders for mass deployment and multi-phase strike on the Pilgrims main base. Get eyes on this, we’re going skids up in less than a day.” The Senior ATC said. The plan called for the use of most of the Victory’s runabouts, and Patch would undoubtedly be piloting one of them.

Patch un-reclined his chair(one of the rear seats that sat around a small 6 person planning table near the rear of the ready room, and walked over to the pair. The ATC copied and sent the preliminary plan to Patch’s padd.

“Copied it to your padd.” The ATC said.

“So basically, we’ll have half of the Immortals plowing the road, another flight and our 2 Volga’s will provide escort for a pair of shuttles that will insert a strike team to the temple. Our 4th flight of Valkyries will be an airborne QRF/Reserve, and the remaining runabouts will be on standby for general support and CSAR/Recovery duties.” The flight leader, a junior Lt JG, said.

Patch took a minute to look over the plan that was apparently put together, presumably in a rush, by Elkader and Ayres.

“Well this is fucking dumb. And risky… and we can do better.” He started tapping on his padd, re-arranging some of the assigned roles.

“Well, this came from Captain Ayres and the boss.” The flight leader said, referring to Elkader as the boss of the Immortals.

“So? Um, and just to be clear, I’m not saying this whole plan is dumb, but, these parts are…here, I’ll…just copy this…back to you both with some revisions….there.” He made one final tap on his padd that sent a copy of the orders with his revision highlighted in blue letters.

As the ATC and flight leader reviewed his alterations Patch laid it out in a nutshell.

“First, if you’re plowing the road, plow the fucking road. At the ranges we’re talking about in this target system there is no point in holding back a 4 ship flight for QRF and a separate one for a mid mission escort detail. You send 12 of the Immortals on the initial sweep. Then the Volga’s escorting the strike package in is all well and fine, and the mission commander can decide if and when to chop an element or flight from that dozen to circle back and assist the escort.” Patch paused and the other 2 nodded indicating they were following so far.

“And as for a split strike team going in on 2 type 12’s, I mean, sure on paper having mission critical skillsets split on the 2 ingress vehicles is fine for redundancy and adaptability, but fuck right off with the type 12’s…sure they’re a decent all around tactical auxiliary vessel, but we’ve got a New Atlantic onboard boys, and a tactical mission module for it sitting in the maintenence shack. It takes a couple hours to swap it for the general purpose module it has equipped right now. And if we want to give that ground team the best chance to actually get boots ‘on the X’, the New Atlantic is the boat, she’s faster, better armed and armoured then the type 12’s. The only thing the type 12’s have over the Trafalgar(the name of the New Atlantic) is a bit of maneuverability, and when you’re talking about a combat ground insertion, maneuverability is very low on the list of priorities.”

The other 2 kept nodding as they were in agreement with Patch so far, none of the 3 noticed that Elkader had entered the room while they were chatting.

“Now that Arrows, they would be wasted if we left them in general support or CSAR duties. They’d be much better suited to performing an initial feint attack from the other side of the system, just before the initial wave of Valkyries head in.” Patch finished up his pontificating.

“Great feedback Lt. All good stuff. Which part do you want to take charge of?” Elkader said when she noticed a break in the chatter.