“So, naval intelligence, huh?” he said looking up at her. “You were on Admiral Kayumati’s staff, on board Pensacola when she took that fire lance hit that tore her in half. Lucky to survive that one.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and despite herself she shuddered at the memory, at the day spent in the dark claustrophobic isolation of an escape pod, feeling her fingers and toes begin to freeze, giving up hope of rescue, and then suddenly safe again aboard HMS Exeter.
“Sorry if that’s an awkward subject,” the admiral said. Cassandra looked up, remembered where she was.
“Quite all right, sir. I certainly wasn’t the only one who had some anxious moments that day. Most of the others on Pensacola, and the other ships in the task force, were less fortunate than I.”
“Uh-huh. I lost about a half-dozen old friends that day, and a couple old enemies I miss near as much. Navies are like that, aren’t they? Like a family, including the fact you don’t get to pick ’em.”
He looked away and shook his head as if trying to clear it of his own memories.
“Commander, I’m trying to catch up on what’s what in this command. I know we’ve had to do a peck of improvising these last few months, but that’s no excuse for sloppy work.”
“Yes, sir, I quite agree.”
“Huh. You know, this whole Incident Seventeen business—USS Cam Ranh Bay disappearing just when that mysterious jump missile showed up and gave a burst transmission, then melted—that can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“I do not believe so, sir.”
“Wonder what it is then. I got a dispatch here from the CNO,” he said, tapping one of the open documents before him. “It was waiting for me when I got here yesterday. It says to light a fire under you and get a final report out of your working group. How long you been at this?”
Cassandra had been expecting this. She and Rice—and Nuvaash to an extent—had done everything they could to prolong the investigation, but they had been reduced to redoing old work. Even some of the other members of the working group were becoming impatient and suspicious.
“Just past four months now, sir,” she answered.
The admiral leaned back in his chair and his frown deepened. “Hell, the shooting didn’t last half that long. Now we can’t find one measly little transport that’s gone missing? I wonder if it would have riled as much if anyone else had been in command but Bitka. Most successful fighting captain we had in the war, and some idiot gives him a transport? ‘Bow-on Bitka,’ they called him, but you must have known that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She felt no need to tell him how thoroughly Bitka had loathed that nickname, but remembering it brought a sudden tightness to her chest and her throat.
“He fought in twice as many battles as any other surviving captain in the fleet,” the admiral continued, “and he was probably the least decorated. What do you make of that, Commander?”
“I . . . I don’t believe it is my place to comment on the awards policy of your service—”
“Travesty, that’s what it is,” the admiral said, cutting her off, “and I don’t give a good goddamn what he said about my brother, the CNO. From what I can tell, Bitka should have the Medal of Honor, along with Bonaventure and that other one they gave it to. They didn’t even give Bitka the Navy Cross! Does that seem right to you?”
“I . . . really, Admiral Goldjune, I don’t feel—”
“All right,” he said and looked away for a moment, his thoughts elsewhere, before resuming. “You know, when I was still head of BuShips I received a report from him. That was right before all this happened. His recommendations on design improvements in the next group of destroyer riders, assuming we decide to build any more. I imagine you had a hand in that report.”
“Only to correct his spelling, sir. The thinking was entirely his own.”
“Huh. He had a head on his shoulders, I’ll give him that. Wonder if he still does. Well, as to that, I have been looking over your interim progress reports. So has the CNO, by the way. That would be my brother? You re-interviewed every witness. You had to pull three of them back from Earth rotation, which took a few weeks right there. Didn’t come up with one single new thing. The CNO thinks you’re dragging your feet, doing the work over and over, trying to put off filing a final report.”
Cassandra felt her face redden.
“I assure you, sir—”
“Sloppy,” he said with a shake of his head. He sat back in his chair, expression unreadable.
“Sir?”
He tilted his head back and examined her as if through spectacles, eyes narrowing in appraisal. She thought she saw a flicker of a smile as well, although that seemed unlikely under the circumstances.
“All those re-interviews and you didn’t come up with a single new insight? You weren’t looking hard enough, Commander. I told you I won’t stand for sloppy work.”
Cassandra felt a renewed surge of anxiety. The admiral could simply relieve her and replace her with Korvetenkapitän Heidegger of the Deutsche Sternmarine, the next senior officer in her working group. Heidegger would be happy to pronounce Bitka dead and get back to his other duties.
“I’m very sorry sir, but—”
“Re-interview ’em.”
Cassandra wasn’t sure she understood him at first.
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Re-interview every single witness. This time do it right. There has to be something you missed.”
Cassandra stared at him, trying to sort out what that meant. Most of the witnesses had rotated out-system. In would take weeks to recontact them, at least another month, perhaps two, to bring them here and conduct the interviews. He was ordering her to do exactly what she most wanted to do. Was this some sort of trap?
The admiral leaned forward, folded his hands on his desk, and looked her in the eye.
“Commander, if we’re going to do this—and we are going to do this—then let’s by God do it right. If anyone gives you any trouble, you direct them to my office. Do you understand me?”
Oh, she had been blind and stupid! Yes, he was the CNO’s brother, but as he had said, one doesn’t get to pick one’s family, does one?
“I think I am beginning to understand, sir.”
“Good. Good. Now while you’re lining all that up, you may have some down time. I looked over the intercepted code of the burst transmission from the unknown jump missile—basically a bunch of gibberish.”
That surprised her as well. He had actually read the technical annexes instead of just the executive summary? What sort of admiral was this man? “I am certain the code means something to someone, sir. We simply have not been able to decode it.”
“But we already agreed that missile’s transmission and Cam Ranh Bay jumping away wasn’t a coincidence,” he said. “That means the jump drive on Bitka’s ship must have been able to decode that transmission. Doesn’t that excite your curiosity?”
Cassandra leaned forward in her chair and for the first time smiled. “Admiral, I would murder to find out why that was so, but up to now our investigation has, under strict orders from above, been confined to a few very limited topics. We have been empowered to investigate all known uBakai encryption systems to see if any one of them share any features with this code. They do not. Since our jump drives are all Varoki manufactured, this makes it difficult to imagine how the code could even have affected the jump drive, since we have a fairly good idea of what the jump drive control code sequences look like.”
“Well, might be there’s another code, down under the Varoki operating systems,” the admiral said, “something real different, weird even. Alien.”
Cassandra sat back and studied the admiral. Alien? Well of course, the Varoki were aliens, but that couldn’t have been what he meant. He had a look that said she was supposed to understand there was more to what he knew than what he could say. But what?
“I wonder, sir, if you have any suggestions as to how we might go about discovering such an
underlying code?”
“Got to go out and look for it. Open your commlink, Commander, and I’ll give you a data dump.”
He squinted his eyes, working through the visual menu for his own surgically embedded commlink, and then Cassandra felt a faint vibration at the base of her skull indicating a successful data transfer.
“That’s orbital telemetry,” he explained, “for the jump drive module of the uBakai cruiser KBk Four-Two-Nine. They jettisoned that jump drive after its containment system was breached in the First Battle of K’tok, last December. When the uBakai pulled all their remaining starships out of the system, Four-Two-Nine was stranded in the outer belts without a jump drive. They surrendered after disabling their weapons and wiping the code ciphers, but their log was still intact. We were able to calculate the trajectory of the jump module.”
We? she wondered. So this was not simply one admiral with an axe to grind against his more-successful brother.
“Our new orbital sensor platform found it,” he continued, “drifting on a course will probably take it clear out of the star system in another year or two.”
“But admiral, if the jump drive module was compromised as you say, the anti-tamper system was activated. Otherwise they would not have jettisoned it.”
“Oh, you know about that? Well, ’course you do. Some sort of cloud of microscopic particles, eats through any soft seal we know of, including vacuum suits, and also contains an anaerobic neurotoxin—fatal, but not quick nor pretty. You get any sort of containment breach on the jump core, that cloud gets out and the only way to save your ship is to eject the whole module, and I mean right quick.
“But you know what? I been doing some reading too and I can’t find any record of a busted drive module that’s been around in hard vacuum for more than a few weeks. Usually the Varoki just give them a real hard shove into a star or a big-old gas giant—easiest way to make sure they’re destroyed without anyone risking contamination. But this thing’s been floatin’ out there in the cold and dark for over seven months. I wonder if all that neurotoxin cloud is still active. I wonder if maybe it froze or just dispersed by now. It can’t live forever, can it?”
Cassandra felt herself tense, but not with fear, with anticipation. Her mind raced with the possibilities. If they could just look inside a jump drive module, just see how it worked . . . yes, they might find the answer to what happened to Bitka, and answers to so many other questions as well. But the cold part of her brain, the one trained in military intelligence, remained unconvinced.
“Admiral, given how jealously the Varoki guard the secret of the jump drive, why haven’t they recovered it? Either the ships of the uBakai Star Navy which were here, or a factory charter since the ceasefire?”
He nodded in agreement.
“That makes perfect sense, but war and perfect sense don’t always get along. You know, it’s only been seventy Earth years since First Contact with the Cottohazz. But before they found us that commonwealth had been around, exploring and colonizing for about two hundred years. In that whole time they never had one honest-to-God interstellar war, not until the one we just damped back down.
“Nobody is used to this. Nobody on either side was ready for it—not psychologically, anyway, and nobody knows quite what to do next. So I think what happened was a lot of things fell through the cracks. uBakai Star Navy had their hands full just staying alive—and didn’t do all that good job at it. And in all the confusion, the Varoki manufacturer, AZ Simki-Traak Transtellar, seems to have lost track of that one jump module.”
“That seems . . . unlikely, sir,” she said.
“Could be they had some help,” he said softly.
He smiled and she felt adrenaline course through her body, felt her senses sharpen and her scalp tingle. In the admiral’s smile, she suspected, was the hint of what might have been one of the most closely guarded covert operations in human history. She knew better than to acknowledge that conclusion in any way.
“So in all that downtime you’ve got, why don’t you and your team go take a look at that module?” The admiral leaned back in his chair and said this casually, as if suggesting nothing more serious than a weekend outing. “Anyone asks, you’re checking out a large piece of debris our scanners picked up, make sure it’s not a hazard to astrogation.”
“If I might make a suggestion, sir, we could investigate it as a possible piece of wreckage from Bitka’s ship. That would explain the interest by my working group.”
“Yes, that’s better,” the admiral said. “Good thinking. Our three surviving destroyers are handling orbital security. Given the ceasefire I can get by with two for a while. Take USS Puebla, Bitka’s old boat. Go poke around and see what you can find. When you get there, though, I wouldn’t send anyone into that jump module who owed you money.”
“From what you’ve told me, sir, I would rather find a way of examining it remotely. Failing that, I suppose I have no choice but to be the first one into the module myself.”
Admiral Goldjune looked at her appraisingly. “Sounds like some of Bitka might have rubbed off on you.” He looked aside and the sadness she had seen before returned to his face. “Wish a little had rubbed off on my boy Larry.”
CHAPTER ONE
Five months earlier, Outworld Coalition Naval Headquarters Complex, the planet K’tok
12 February 2134 (seven days before Incident Seventeen)
What went wrong?
Everything seemed so right with Cassandra from the first night they made love—which was also the first time they’d actually met face-to-face. After a dozen holoconferences and a shared nightmare of fire and death that sometimes seemed a lifetime long, it was easy to forget how briefly they’d known each other. Maybe that didn’t matter. People waste so much of every day, every week, every month, what difference does it make how many boxes are marked off the calendar? Those hours that seem like a year’s worth of life . . . well, they are, aren’t they? Worth a year.
So what went wrong?
Sam noticed it first in bed: exclamations of pleasure which seemed for his benefit rather than hers. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy their lovemaking. She was passionate and responsive, and he loved how afterwards she would lie beside him shuddering slightly, irregularly, as if her nervous system needed time to reset. So why spread a layer of pretense over the authentic pleasure underneath? She hadn’t done it at first—or maybe he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t think that was it. Something changed, but what? And why?
Then she’d stopped disagreeing with him. They’d had wonderful arguments, filled with mock outrage and laughter . . . and then they just didn’t anymore. She listened thoughtfully, agreed, but seldom prolonged a conversation with her own thoughts, which he began to think were elsewhere.
Sam considered confronting her with his concern, but what was there to say? “I think something’s wrong between us because you seem to enjoy sex and agree with me too much?” Sam knew bringing it up would make things worse, make them both self-conscious, and he didn’t want that. But more importantly it would feel like as intrusion. Sam remembered Rosemary, his former fiancé from what seemed a lifetime ago but had actually been less than two years. She would always ask him if she’d done something wrong when work or his complicated relationship with his family left him more quiet than usual. No, it isn’t about you, he would say, but she never quite believed him. Sam wouldn’t subject Cassandra to that. So he gave her space to work it out herself.
And she had.
Would things have been different if he’d made the first move, brought everything out into the open? A stupid question. Would things have been different if he was a different guy who thought differently and acted differently? Sure. So what? He wasn’t a different guy, he was this one.
So what was so wrong with this one that Cassandra had to walk away from him, and do it so gently, so carefully, as if he were delicate as a paper-thin antique vase that would crumble if you raised your voice or made a sudden move or just touch
ed it wrong? That was the only part of it that left him angry: she had no right to treat him as if he were fragile.
“Admiral Stevens will see you now, Captain Bitka.”
The yeoman’s voice recalled Sam from his reverie and back to the admiral’s anteroom. Moments later, hat tucked under his arm, he stood before the desk of the commanding admiral, First Combined Fleet.
“Lieutenant Commander Samuel Bitka, reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Just what the hell am I supposed to do with this fitness report on Lieutenant Goldjune?” the admiral began without preamble, tapping an open document file on the smart surface of his desk. “Remain at attention, Bitka.”
Sam looked over the admiral’s head as military courtesy demanded, in this case at the view of the K’tok Needle out the broad window of the fleet commander’s office. He could hardly see the needle today for the low clouds and fast-moving rain squalls that swept over and past the downstation complex.
Should he tell Vice Admiral Stevens what he thought the admiral could do with the fitness report?
No. It would take a miracle to save him from a second charge of insubordination, and lately he had the feeling he’d run through all his miracles. Besides, there was no civilian job to go back to and the fragile ceasefire with the uBakai might collapse at any time. He was where he needed to be. He sure couldn’t do anything useful from inside a Navy brig.
“Admiral, I don’t know that there’s anything to do with it but forward it to BuPers. It is my honest evaluation of Lieutenant Goldjune.”
“Not recommended for promotion? At all? Are you serious, Bitka?”
“Yes, sir, I cannot recommend the lieutenant for promotion.”
“Bottom ten percent of the officers you have worked with?”
“Yes, sir, that is my assessment.”
Admiral Stevens leaned back in his chair and looked Sam over. Stevens was in his late fifties but looked ten years younger, trim and athletic with a dusting of grey in his thick curly brown hair. He wore a short-sleeved white uniform shirt and his bare forearms were hairy and tattooed. The left arm had a coiled serpent with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.” The right arm had a large anchor superimposed over a stylized starship. Sam gathered from these that the admiral was a traditionalist.
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