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He awoke slowly, taking in the soft beeps and faint thrum of engines around him. They’d been disconcerting when his team was first stationed on the Minerva, but he’d gotten used to them, just like he’d – no, that couldn’t be right. The Minerva had gone down on the moon. And the moon was gone, so he had to be on another ship. He’d be able to figure it out if his head would stop hurting; he hadn’t felt this groggy since Neo-Genesis, when the Destiny had been shot down –

He’d been shot down.

The fight over Zokoz II came back to him in a flash. He struggled to sit up, but it was hard enough just to open his eyes in the bright medbay, and one of his arms was wrapped in some sort of plaster, making it awkward just to scramble just to angle himself slightly upright against the pillow. “What happened?” he choked, his voice coming out hoarse with disuse.

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"I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of people on this boat are really fucking smart. You think they can't look at the battle footage and do something? 'Cause I do. I've been looking over it myself and I already have some ideas. You should give it a glance."

Not that many people had recorded anything useful, and some of the cockpit cams made her vaguely nauseous, but it was worth it.

"Hell, I bet if we try hard enough we can run that battle in the sims."

He perked up at that. "I can set up combat simulations if there's enough recordings."

"That's the way to think," she said cheerfully. "I'll run it with you when we get it online - hell, we'll probably want the whole squadron to run it. I don't think all of us were in the air in that battle, even."

That was something that got under her skin. Maybe they'd gotten stuck on the planet, but she knew her duty was to get shipside as soon as possible in an attack, and to get into a cockpit posthaste.

"Duh," he scoffed. "Some of them aren't even military."

"Don't knock the enlisted men," Trudy said with a small quirk of her mouth. Because that's what she saw them as - enlisted. "Winchester was up there with us, and Fenton, and a couple others whose voices I can't really place."

She shrugged one shoulder. "That's not an excuse for the rest of 'em, but we haven't even had basic. We haven't drilled for a crisis." Both of which would change once Trudy got ahold of the General's ear. Or the Colonel's, whichever one came first.

"They're not gonna change overnight."

"Hell no. 'S why when the General finally gives the go-ahead, we're going to have real basic. Twelve weeks of training, and then we'll see who comes out the other end a pilot."

She would run them through Marine basic with tweaks if the General would let her and she would not be nice about it.

"Twelve weeks? That's nothing!" he protested.

"Twelve weeks of basic," Trudy corrected. "That doesn't count time in the sims, that doesn't count pilot training, or anything like it. And if this whole thing was up to me none of you would have gotten into a ship until you passed, but it isn't up to me and we don't have the luxury of waiting."

What it would do would be to put Rogue Squadron as first priority in the pilots' minds, and it would make them tighter as a unit, and it would strengthen the chain of command. Which, in a military unit, mattered almost as much as the technical training.

"None of you?" he scowled. "I graduated at the top of an academy class full of Coordinators."

"Sure, and you're a brilliant pilot," she said. That was easy to say because he was, she'd seen him in action. "And I was an officer before I got here, but that has jack-all to do with it."

The point of basic training was not to teach people how to be pilots. The point of basic training was to teach people how to be military.

"At least you run in the right direction when some bastard attacks."

Trudy laughed. She wasn't sure how many people hadn't gotten into their ships just because it was one thing to volunteer for the unit when they weren't being shot at and another to scramble with them when they were. "I'm a Marine, kid, if I ran the other way I'd strip myself of rank out of shame."

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