Tarnished Knight

by Jack Campbell

  Turning away, Iceni walked for the exit. If the stars or something else ever does judge my life, judges everything that I’ve done, I’m not expecting a happy outcome for myself from that.

  Just outside the exit, Iceni saw the physician from C-448 as she returned from checking the crew at the citadels. “How are they? All of them?”

  The physician shrugged. She was an older woman, close to retirement age, who always seemed weighted by the lives she had failed to save in all the years of her service. “They are all malnourished and suffering from severe physical stress.” She shrugged again. “When I was just starting out, I spent six months of my medical training as an assistant at a labor camp, so it’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  Labor camps. The Syndicate Worlds’ all-purpose form of punishment short of immediate death. All too often, labor camps had simply been a more extended means of carrying out a death sentence. She had known people sent to labor camps. A few of them had come home when their sentences were up. The others hadn’t survived long enough.

  Thinking of that, and of what the snakes had tried to do here, and what the line workers had endured to make possible her own success, something inside Iceni fractured. “There will be no more labor camps. Not anywhere that I have authority.” She walked away, leaving Rogero and the physician staring in her wake, her footsteps echoing hollowly through the empty passageways of the battleship as the soldiers guarding her hastened to catch up.

  * * *

  “TWO of the light cruisers want to join us,” Marphissa reported. C-448 had mated to one side of the battleship, like a lamprey attached to a whale, allowing easy access for crew and supplies. “And two of the HuKs. The other light cruiser and the other two HuKs that left their flotilla want to head for the star systems where most of their crews came from.”

  “Where are those star systems?” Iceni asked, leaning back in the command seat of the battleship. Few of its controls worked at the moment, but it still felt awesome to sit there. With just her and Marphissa present, it only emphasized how much larger and impressive the battleship’s bridge was compared to that of a heavy cruiser.

  “The light cruiser wants to get to Cadez. The HuKs are aiming for Dermat and Kylta.”

  “None of those are close.” Iceni sighed, feeling a curiously weary sensation now that the tension of the last several days was relieved by the successes. “But if they’re home for those crews, I wish them luck. What about the light cruiser and two HuKs that headed for the second planet?”

  “They’re in orbit there. We’ve seen some shuttle activity. There are no signs of trouble on the planet, though, or in comms.” Marphissa paused, her gaze wandering across the almost deserted bridge. “I talked with Colonel Rogero about that. We think the citizens here are waiting to see what you do, Madam President, and what the senior snakes do.”

  “That’s a good guess. Citizens who don’t learn to wait and see what their superiors are up to tend to pay a big price.” Iceni smiled wryly at Marphissa. “Are you and the colonel friends now, Kommodor?”

  “Not exactly friends. Mutual respect is probably the best term, I think. And I’m not crazy enough to want to get involved with a dirt eater even if he weren’t giving off vibes of already being involved with someone else.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just an impression. You know how some people seem to be wearing a ring even when they’re not. Colonel Rogero felt like that to me.”

  Wearing a ring? With an Alliance officer involved? “Did he make a play for you?”

  That brought a laugh from the Kommodor. “No. I’m sure if he intended that, he knew he’d be wasting his time.”

  “You’re committed to someone?” Iceni asked. It never hurt to know little details about people that might be useful in the future.

  This time Marphissa smiled, but sadly. “There’s only been two men that I might have committed to. One died at Atalia before that happened, fighting the Alliance. The other told me after my brother was arrested by the snakes that associating with me any longer might harm his career.”

  “How nice,” Iceni commented.

  “I’m sure once he got out of the hospital, he went on to some other fool woman.” Marphissa looked around the bridge again, clearly wanting to change the topic. “Where are we going to get enough people to crew this battleship?”

  “We’ll have to recruit. Maybe in other star systems, like Taroa. A lot of people there are probably eager to leave right now.” Iceni gave Marphissa a half smile. “This battleship is going to need a commander. Any suggestions?”

  “I . . . will have to go through personnel files for the other field-grade mobile forces commanders available to us—”

  “Kommodor Marphissa, this is where you’re supposed to say something like ‘I would be honored if you would consider me for such an assignment.’”

  Marphissa stared at her. “Two months ago, I hadn’t even commanded a heavy cruiser.”

  “And two months ago, I was a CEO, not a president. The individual in command of this battleship has to be someone I trust, someone who can handle the responsibility, and someone who can serve as my senior mobile forces commander.” And someone who isn’t too ambitious. If you had immediately volunteered yourself, you might not have been offered the assignment. “If you want it, the job’s yours.”

  “I am honored by your trust and confidence in me, Madam President. Yes. I would be pleased to accept such an assignment.” She looked around again, this time with a growing sense of ownership visible in her eyes. “B-78. Somehow it seems it should have more of a name than that.”

  “Oh? Like the Alliance does? The Inexplicable or the Undesirable or the Insufferable?”

  Marphissa grinned. “The crews already give the mobile units nicknames.”

  “I know. When I was a subexecutive, I was on heavy cruiser C-333. The line workers called it the Cripple Three when they thought no officer could hear them.”

  “The crew on C-448 call the cruiser the Double Eight. If our warships are going to have names, don’t they deserve better names than that?”

  “Like what?” Iceni waved around the bridge. “What should B-78 be called?”

  Kommodor Marphissa looked slowly about her, then back at Iceni. “B-78 will be the flagship of the Midway Star System?”

  “Of course.”

  “We could call it the Midway. Battleship Midway. I’m certain she would proudly represent that name.”

  “Hmmm.” She? Give a ship a name, and people immediately started talking about it as if it were a living thing. But, then, the line workers, the crews, had always done that, too. About every ten years or so in the past someone higher up would propose formally naming mobile units, citing intangibles like morale and unit cohesion, but the proposals had always died in the bureaucracy, which cited cost, the lack of proven concrete benefits, and the redundancy of giving a name to something that already had a perfectly good unit number. One of the few cases where bureaucrats have repeatedly objected to redundancy. And they killed some of my proposals, too, on equally arbitrary grounds. It would be nice to make this happen knowing how unhappy it would make the bean counters. “I’ll consider it.”

  “Kommodor!”

  Marphissa clenched her jaw. “There’s never any rest, is there?” she commented, then accepted the call. “Here. I’m on the bridge of the battleship.”

  “There’s something happening on the mobile forces facility.”

  “Something?”

  “Internal and external explosions, Kommodor.”

  Iceni tapped her own comm unit. “Colonel Rogero, get someone up here fast to watch the bridge. I need to get back over to the C-448.”

  * * *

  SETTLING into her seat on the bridge of the heavy cruiser, Iceni called up a close-in look at the mobile forces facility. Thou
gh that was orbiting the gas giant just like the battleship, it was distant enough to be almost invisible around the curve of the planet and no threat to the ships with Iceni.

  But something was definitely happening there. “We don’t have comms that might indicate what’s going on?”

  “There’s fighting taking place,” the specialist currently occupying the operations console offered.

  “Is there?” Iceni put all the crushing force of a CEO’s sarcasm into that reply.

  Marphissa turned to face all her specialists. “Find out who is fighting and any indications of why. Someone on there must be talking to someone else.”

  “President Iceni?”

  “Yes, Colonel Rogero.”

  “I understand there is fighting on the mobile forces facility. Will you require any of my soldiers to conduct operations there?”

  That was a very reasonable question. Iceni felt like slapping herself at having forgotten for a moment that she had ground forces available.

  But only three squads. And that mobile forces facility might not be large by shipyard standards, but it was damned big by most other criteria. “Do we have any idea how many people are on that facility?”

  The operations specialist, perhaps trying to make up for his earlier gaff, answered her quickly. “That design should have a standard base-occupancy level of six hundred, with up to one thousand more possible based on current work under way.”

  “I’ll need more ammunition,” Colonel Rogero said. “If that facility actually has that many workers on it.”

  “There’s no sign of other ships being worked on,” Marphissa said. “If we could see inside the primary dock—”

  “We have a blowout on the primary dock,” the operations specialist announced as the information flashed onto their displays. “Something blew up inside. Our systems are estimating a Hunter-Killer with partial core collapse.”

  “That’s as good as a look inside. It means there is nothing inside that dock,” Marphissa said to Iceni. “Nothing left, that is. Nothing left of the dock, either.”

  “Somebody was trying to get away,” Iceni guessed. “But who?”

  “Madam President, we have a message for you from the facility.”

  “Show me.” Iceni saw the window pop up before her, revealing a stern-looking woman in the uniform of a senior maintenance line worker.

  “This is . . . this is Stephani Ivaskova. I am a free worker!”

  Oh, damn. That’s not good.

  “We have taken this facility from the ISS and from the Syndicate Worlds. Our workers’ committee is in charge. We want you to . . . to recognize our control!”

  Iceni waited a moment longer to see if Free Worker Ivaskova was done, then replied. Since the orbiting mobile forces facility was only a couple of light-seconds distant, the delay in communications wouldn’t really be noticeable. “This is President Iceni of the Midway Star System. We have no reason to attack you as long as you refrain from any actions against us.”

  “You . . . whatever president means, we don’t want any more CEOs or executives telling us what to do.”

  “This isn’t my star system,” Iceni said. “I have no interest in trying to control anyone here.”

  “You are holding property belonging to us,” Ivaskova declared. “We insist that you turn it over to our workers’ committee.”

  “What property would that be?”

  “The battleship.”

  Iceni shook her head, keeping her expression unrevealing. “We took that battleship from the Syndicate Worlds, not from you. I intend keeping it. As soon as we know it’s safe to move, we’ll take it to Midway to finish readying it for full operational capability.”

  Ivaskova turned her head, talking to what seemed to be more than one other person, the off-side conversation rendered deliberately unintelligible by the comm software. Based on the changes in Ivaskova’s expression and the way her gestures became more and more emphatic, the talk rapidly escalated into a vigorous argument of some kind.

  “Workers’ committee?” Marphissa asked Iceni. “What is that?”

  “Another word for anarchy. Workers’ committees are like a virus, Kommodor. A plague. We need to ensure that plague does not spread to our warships. Get our comm experts to work blocking every means of communicating with that facility except through one channel that you personally control.”

  “The back doors—”

  “Shut them down as fast as new ones open,” Iceni ordered. “This is top priority for your comm personnel.”

  “Yes, Madam President.”

  “And ensure that someone is watching the comm personnel to make sure that they aren’t talking to the workers’ committee either.”

  As Marphissa worked, Ivaskova finally turned back to Iceni. “We demand the battleship.”

  “Your demand is noted. Are any of your executives still alive?” Iceni asked, fairly sure that she could easily distract the workers’ committee.

  “Uh, yes, a few. Most died, either fighting the snakes or fighting us, especially when the HuK in the main dock blew while they were trying to get away. We know that Sub-CEO Petrov died there.”

  “What has been happening on the second planet? It seems very quiet, but so did your facility until recently.”

  Ivaskova might be a free worker in name, but a lifetime of answering to authority caused her to reply to Iceni without questioning her role. “The snakes took over. They killed a lot of people. There were demonstrations going because the citizens, the workers, demanded more rights. We wanted the CEOs and the snakes to go, so we could govern ourselves. And then the snakes hit, and nobody wanted to do anything for a while since the snakes controlled the mobile forces. But we saw you beat them, so we moved. Those three mobile units orbiting the second planet, they’re snake-controlled still, right? As long as they’re in orbit, the people on the planet might wait. But maybe not. We’re tired of this. Sick of this. We’d rather die than be slaves any longer.”

  This just kept getting worse. If that kind of thinking spread to Midway . . . Iceni felt sudden gratitude for Colonel Malin’s advice to throw a bone to the citizens to keep them from demanding the entire feast. “I appreciate your assistance, Worker Ivaskova. I will be back in touch with you.” Iceni ended the call, then let out a heavy sigh.

  How to keep this confined to Kane?

  And what would those mobile forces units controlled by the snakes do if the planet they orbited broke into full revolt? She knew the answer, and it sickened her to think of the destruction and death that would rain down on the planet from above.

  Not that she could afford to worry about that. Nor should she. It’s about protecting my own position at Midway. If I start worrying about the welfare of the citizens . . . All right, I do worry about that. “It would be useful for Kane to end up allied with us.”

  “Madam President?” Marphissa asked.

  “I was just thinking aloud, Kommodor. Aside from comms, do you think the people on that mobile forces facility can pose any threat to us? They were very insistent on wanting the battleship.”

  Marphissa’s brow furrowed in thought. “If they want it, they won’t try to destroy it by improvising mass throwers, but we still should move it beyond their reach. If I mate another heavy cruiser to the battleship we can tow it, slowly, until the planet blocks any view of it from the mobile forces facility.”

  “Excellent. Do that.”

  “If they didn’t blow up all of their tugs when that HuK was destroyed, they might use some of them to try to reach the battleship. If that happens, we can either destroy the tugs en route or let Colonel Rogero’s soldiers deal with the workers when they debark.”

  “The second approach will be more subtle if it comes to that.” Iceni frowned at her display. “We need to send someone after those three warship
s still controlled by the snakes.”

  “We can’t catch them,” Marphissa said. “Not unless they decide to give battle.”

  “No, but we can chase them away from the second planet. According to the workers on the mobile forces facility, the snakes suppressed earlier mass dissent and are still in charge on that planet, but the population is ready to rise up again. There can’t be that many snakes left here, so they’re holding the population hostage using those warships.”

  “If we send a force to drive off the warships . . .”

  “The senior snakes will either have to take their chances among the populace or get on those three units and head for the nearest jump exit,” Iceni finished. “Two of our heavy cruisers are going to be tied up towing the battleship a short ways.”

  “That leaves one heavy,” Marphissa said. “We send C-555, plus four light cruisers and four HuKs. That will be plenty enough to overwhelm the remaining snake forces if they try to fight, and leave us the two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, and the remaining five HuKs here in case we have to defend the battleship from a suicidal attack or some other flotilla showing up at an awkward moment.”

  “Get that going. Notify the commander of C-555 that he will be in command of the detached flotilla. I want to see how he handles that. And one more thing. Detach a single HuK to proceed back to Midway immediately to provide General Drakon with information on what has happened so far. Make sure the HuK has the latest, best estimate for when we can move that battleship under its own power again without worrying about its blowing up.”

  Iceni looked at her display, trying to think, trying to recall if she had forgotten anything. She had been talking about a single HuK. Was there another single HuK that had been a concern? Oh. “Kommodor, did you hear what the workers on the mobile forces facility said happened to that HuK in their primary dock?” she asked Marphissa in a voice pitched low enough that it seemed intended for only the Kommodor, but that the specialists on the bridge would also be able to hear. “They blew it up when those aboard were trying to leave. Everyone aboard died.”