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The air circulators on the pinnace Hiram Percy Maxim provided the softest background noise to the conversation between Gabriel Smith and his senior officers. They had all been taken aback by the sumptuous splendor of what was supposedly a routine Fleet Officer dinner before a major set of maneuvers.

“They knew I was the senior captain of the squadron,” Gloriana Woodruff said, “and I’d quoted to them my equivalent Space Guard rank when they asked where Ship Commander fit into our rank structure. Because we are the visiting barbarians, they dropped me at one end of the head table. I considered protesting, Gabriel, that you should be up there, but I had absolutely no idea where you were, and assumed that you would speak up for yourself if it appeared appropriate. From your description of what the Junior Ensigns had to say, you learned more than I did. After the dinner, Grand Admiral Thatcher’s adjutant took me aside and announced that since I’d been opaque over dinner he would have to explain things clearly and simply. If we wanted a role in the maneuvers, we had to pay him off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral off, we had to pay the Grand Admiral’s mistress off, we had to pay off an impressively long list of officers, but fortunately, since we had no idea how much to give to each of them, he would take care of that.  All I had to do was give him a hundred thousand Stellars to compensate him for his difficulties in having to deal with primitive barbarians like us. He was severely taken back when I explained to him that the Service does not pay bribes.  Apparently the lubricating power of cold cash is central to the operation of the Stellar Republic’s fleet.”

“Did anyone,” Gabriel Smith asked, “hear anything that did not suggest that the maneuvers are totally scripted? From the description, absolutely everything has been planned in advance, so the ships make the moves that had been planned for them, and the officers and men on each of them get to sit there and watch things happen. Whoever is at the helm actually has to point their ship in the right direction and fly it at the right acceleration, not that the automatic flight controls won’t do that, but they have exact flight plans.”

His officers shook their heads.

“I heard considerable pieces of the maneuver discussed,” Levi Roshwald, captain of the Orville Wright said, “and couldn’t understand how they could be so sure what was going to happen, but it didn’t occur to me they had absolutely no initiative during the exercise and were simply watching ships move around as if they were on a huge motion picture set. If I’d known what was the case, I might’ve asked why they bothered, as opposed to using computer graphics to generate videos of the battle, which everyone could watch while safely at home.”

“I somewhat asked,” Gail Robbins, captain of the Wilbur Wright asked, “how they could be so sure what was going to happen. I was told it was like experiments of long ago they had each performed in freshman physics labs. Everything you were supposed to to do was in the directions, your work was required to get the correct answer from the experiment, and if your answer was off by more than a few percent from the right answer, you were required to repeat the lab until you got the right answer. I don’t see how that approach to lab work leads to competent scientists.  The claim here was that by watching the course of the battle, you learned things you couldn’t learn by watching simulations or reading texts on strategy. I managed to respond ‘Oh, that’s very clever. We never thought of doing things that way’.”

“How did they answer your response?” Smith asked.

“That’s why you’re here, they said, to learn how to conduct fleet operations in the best possible manner, so that when the Union is admitted to the Stellar Republic, you will have the least difficulty in integrating your units into ours, though of course you will be receiving Imperial officers to replace yours until the training of your officers can be upgraded.”

“I was told the same,” Gail said, “and decided it would be hopeless to try to disabuse them of their ideas.”

“I was given,” Smith said, “a data stick with a list of all known asteroids in the volume we’re supposed to search. Electronic security will have to handle it carefully, lest we discover it has some issue. We should find most but not all of them, assuming the list is accurate, and perhaps find a few that aren’t on this list, assuming there are any to be found.  You should each assume that one of the purposes of the exercise is to make us look incompetent, and should not go too far in separating them from the notion that we are primitive and backward.  Of course, in many respects, especially given their patent rules, we are primitive and backward, but we have to live with that.”

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