“Evening, Midshipman.”
“Hi, Lieutenant. I’m free now, if you’re still game.”
“Absolutely! Meet me in five?”
The overlay showed a spot just outside her berthing space, by the main spline ladder junction.
“Sounds good. Thank you, sir.”
“You can hold the sir, y’know, as long as we’re both off-duty.”
Yeah, right. “Uh, sure. I’ll try to remember that.”
“Let’s start with the main armament,” Wagner suggested, leading the way to the gundeck. As they entered through one of the three main armored hatchways, he stood aside and made a sweeping gesture down the deck. “Isn’t that a pretty sight?”
Perhaps it was to a gunner, more than to someone like Kris, but she did her best to look impressed. And it was impressive: the two rows of hulking mounts, eighteen per side, now fully retracted and housed behind the sealed gunports, leaving only a narrow zigzag path to walk through. He explained the operation of the fore, aft, and midship ammo hoists that brought rounds up from the magazines below, and the port and starboard shot trains that conveyed these to each mount’s shot locker. The mounts themselves were normally controlled from CIC, but each was also manned by a crew of three who could operate them independently on local power if the need arose.
“They’re only nine-inchers,” Wagner was saying, referring to the projectile’s diameter. “But they’re long nines. They hit like the mother of God. Those guys with the short twelve’s can have ‘em.” His practiced disdain was expected in a young officer proud of his first ship, and it was aimed at the twelve-inch, three-ring surge gun—unofficially the ‘short twelve’ and very unofficially the ‘short dozen’—which was the standard armament on all battlecruisers built since Kris was born; even heavy cruisers were being refit with them nowadays. The long nine was a seven-ring railgun, and it threw its projectile fifty-percent faster than the three-ring surge gun, giving it a much greater effective range against maneuvering targets and making it ideal for standoff engagements. But the surge gun fired a more massive round at a significantly higher rate of fire: up to ten per minute against a long nine’s six. In a fleet engagement, this was usually decisive, as navy doctrine called for disrupting the enemy’s defense net with torpedoes and missile barrages, and then closing rapidly at the critical moment to finish off individual ships with overwhelming short-range railgun fire.
At least that was what Kris’s academy instructors said, but she had no intention of raising the point with Lieutenant Wagner. The days of chivalric ship duels between agreeable adversaries belonged to the mists of the romantic past—modern missile technology had put them there—and long guns were on their way to joining them. It was maybe a little sad, Kris thought; the romance did have a certain captivating quality to it, and she was trying to think of something appropriate to say in that vein when Wagner pointed at the overhead, to the wide structure that ran like a spine down the length of the gundeck.
“That’s the missile fin,” he explained. “Two hundred sixty-four missiles, all one-meter tubes. Eighty-nine meters long by five wide. We can dump all of ‘em in three minutes if we really want to. And they better hope to God they never make us want to. C’mon”—he jerked his head with a grin—“lemme show you the aft chase mounts.”
Wending their way between the guns, Wagner led her to a lift ladder that took them down two levels and into a dimly lit, cavernous space far aft. In the gloom, Kris could make out three enormous shapes, reposing like sphinxes and much the same shape; two here and one on a half-deck above them.
The lieutenant had not lost his grin during the journey, and now he gestured like a fairground showman. “You might never see these again,” he said portentously, and when Kris questioned him with an askance look that puckered her brow, he announced, “Long fourteens. Got another two as bow chasers. We’re probably the only ship that still has ‘em.”
He was probably right. The long fourteen-inch railgun was almost an anachronism and hadn’t been popular at any time. Too big to be mounted as broadside armament on any ship smaller than a dreadnought, they had been relegated to chase guns, mostly on battleships. By now, all those had been replaced with the new torpedo clusters. Kris thought they could fit half-a-dozen tubes in the space these three guns took, and frankly she wondered why they didn’t.
“With the new magnetic traverse, we can get a full sixty-degree fire cone out of these beauties,” Wagner was explaining, his voice warm with enthusiasm. “And they fire quark-diamond warheads.”
That was a surprise. Quark diamonds were metalized diamonds spiked with inclusions of strange matter, the densest form of matter possible. That gave the warhead extraordinary penetrating power and when it shattered on relativistic impact, it released more energy than a large nuke. In her history classes, Kris had heard about massive 36-inch railguns that had been mounted on monitors during the Formation Wars and used for ground bombardment. Their quark-diamond rounds penetrated hundreds of meters into the planet’s crust before they detonated, and a concerted bombardment could turn a continent into a smoldering slagheap in an afternoon.
Kris knew they were still used in some missiles and with the long 18- and 24-inch railguns that armed the current generation of monitors, but she’d never heard of them being fitted to anything as small as a 14-inch gun. It must have been another innovation that failed to catch on.
Wagner was clearly of a different mind. As he dwelt lovingly on the specifics, Kris wondered at the young sensor officer’s passion for gunnery. Gunnery had lost the luster it once had, the technology being eclipsed by missiles and, especially, the latest generation of torpedoes.
Maybe her expression communicated her thoughts, for Wagner drew his hand down the flank of the nearest mount and declared in a low conspiratorial voice, “I know what the missile mavens and the torpeckers say, but you gotta remember none of that fancy crap’s been battletested. When we put metal on metal out here, I’m betting they’ll wish they’d stuck to their guns.”
With the principle wonders of railguns suitably exhausted, Wagner conducted her around the rest of the ship, showing her the rec spaces and other less martial accommodations with a more subdued air. When he badged them into CIC (his home turf, as it were), he became crisply professional and introduced the watch, supervised by a senior lieutenant named Rachelle Martin, Retribution’s chief fire-control officer. As Retribution was running under Condition III-Easy, the tactical stations were only partly manned, with the EW section consisting of two petty officers and a dour lieutenant who identified himself as Mike Warland and thereafter had nothing whatever to say, while the three rates of the sensor section—Wagner’s department—were being overseen by a lieutenant-jg with the resounding name of Maria Luisa Suarez Martinez, a bubbly Antiguan to whom Kris warmed instantly. For reasons that were not apparent, she went by Sara.
Wagner described for Kris the particulars of the ship’s sensor suite. Although she was already quite familiar with the lightspeed sensors, and knew something about deep radar and the passive gravitic sensors that detected the phase wakes of hypercapable ships, she listened attentively, quite willing to make the best first impression she could. His explanations were brisk and proficient (possibly because Martin was there, or maybe he was just trying to impress Martinez), but Kris felt his heart wasn’t really in it. The only time she caught an echo of his earlier intensity was when he had Martinez put the gravitic sensors through some simulated paces to demonstrate the effects of the improved Swirling filters they’d been working on.
“With these algorithms, we can track a bowling ball out to the Cassini Limit”—smiling with evident pride as he said it. Kris, who’d never heard of a bowling ball before (clearly a challenging target), smiled back, matching his expression as best she could. That concluded the visit, and with a cheery farewell from Martinez, a civil nod from Martin, and a total lack of anything from Warland (who was staring fixedly at the main ESM console and fiddling industriously), the
y made their exit.
“Don’t be too hard on Mike,” Wagner said in confidential murmur when they were alone in the passageway. “Good guy, just quiet. And”—he dropped his voice even further—“he broke up with Sara right before this cruise. Hates standing watch with her.”
“Oh.”
Apparently thinking something else was called for—Kris got the feeling Wagner had his own interests in the attractive young jig and wasn’t sorry to have the field clear—he went on to explain that they had “I dunno, three or four other Luisa’s and gawd knows how many Maria’s” in the crew, so Martinez had adopted Sara as preferable to being assigned a number.
“You don’t really assign people numbers, do ya?” Kris exclaimed in a low, shocked voice.
“No, of course not”—taken aback by her vehemence. “It’s sort of a joke. Like we have a bunch of Henry’s too. Most go by Hank or something, but there was this new guy last cruise, he liked to call himself Henry the Eighth—thought it was really funny for some reason. That’s how it got started. But Sara, she prefers it. Maria Luisa’s her mother’s name, I guess.”
“Oh.” Kris was a bit sorry for her reaction—she should have realized he wasn’t serious—so when he said, “Hey, I’m gonna grab some coffee before I turn in. You wouldn’t want some, would’ja?” she impulsively agreed, then wondered if she’d made a regrettable choice.
They spent the stroll to the junior officer’s mess in small talk, or rather he did, seeming quite happy with Kris’s noncommittal and, at times, monosyllabic answers. It wasn’t until they were sipping their coffee together, companionably enough, that he asked anything approaching a personal question, and that was only to inquire what track she was in.
“Fighters.”
“Really?” A wistful look came over his face, and he shook his head. “Washed outta that myself. Right at the beginning of basic flight. No slots in gunnery these days. Got put into sensors instead.”
Which explained a lot, Kris thought silently.
“Got into the advanced program, I take it?” By Wagner’s reckoning, a cadet exceptional enough to be rated midshipman would obviously be an AFP candidate.
Kris felt her ears get warm. “Uh . . . well, I really hope I do.”
He looked blank. “You mean, you’re not an upper—” and bit the question off.
She answered with a self-conscious shrug and shook her head.
“Oh. That’s a . . .” He paused to consider what it might be. “That’s impressive.” But she wasn’t sure he sounded impressed.
“Thanks. And, um—” She gestured a little haphazardly with the half-full plastic coffee cup. “Thanks for showing me around.”
He crumpled his own cup with a tight-edged smile. “Pleasure. See you in the AM.”
“Yes—Lieutenant.”
They parted ways and Kris hurried back to her berth. So much for avoiding social hitches by accepting a shipboard assignment. Slings and arrows—always the fucking slings and arrows.
Chapter Three
LSS Retribution
New Madras Outstation, Hydra Border Zone
The holographic volume of the big omnisynth dominated Retribution’s Combat Information Center, the battlecruiser’s tactical brain. If CIC were to be described as the brain of the ship (a pedant might have suggested that cerebral cortex was more accurate), the omnisynth might fairly be called its frontal lobe. Not, however, its heart. As with all CEF warships, Retribution’s heart lay on the bridge, in the person of her captain, or in his absence, in his duly appointed vicar, the Officer of the Deck. The CEF insisted on this division of heart and mind on the grounds that the captain’s primary purpose was to lead. CIC was the most heavily shielded part of any warship, tucked deep in the ship’s core, and in the CEF’s view, proper leadership could not be exercised while sitting in a comfy armored bubble.
CEF captains therefore fought the ship from the bridge, while the executive officer was stationed in CIC, there communing with the Tactical Action Officer and assembling the overall picture needed for the captain to exercise command. That command was actually carried out through the TAO; if the captain fought the ship, it was the TAO who actually struck the blows. And it was the TAO, not the executive officer, who took over the ship if the captain was killed or incapacitated.
It was a romantic notion, but the CEF was, on the whole, a romantic service. The opposing view, typified by the decidedly unromantic Halith Imperial Navy, was that hearts and minds should work as one. Halith also considered star captains and admirals vital assets to be protected at all costs. Accordingly, they placed the captain in CIC, where he (female captains being unheard of in the Halith Navy) fought the ship through his Weapons Control Officer and Electronic Warfare Officer, relaying maneuver orders to his executive officer stationed on the bridge. If this contravened the hallowed principle of leading from the front, so be it. Halith mariners were not expected to need inspirational leadership; they were expected to do as they were told.
Most other navies also adopted this arrangement, the Ionians being the sole current exception, but that was due more to their fiercely egalitarian nature than any romantic ideals. Ionian sailors (the term they preferred) became ornery, if not downright mutinous, when a captain “came it the heavy” over them, or “acted the Topping John” in their colorful way of speaking. (The other exception had been the Royal Navy of the New United Kingdom of Friesia and New Caledonia, but they had abandoned the practice decades ago.)
So it was their romantic bent that set the CEF apart, as much or more than their doctrine. They cherished the distinction, and indeed it sometimes overflowed to the point of taking on a religious tint: a ship’s soul, as well as her heart, was often spoken of, and overtly theist commanders (commonly known as ‘blue-lights’) were not unusual. Vice Admiral Angharad Ross, the commander of Seventh Fleet in Cygnus Sector, was a notable example.
Blue-light commanders aside, the theist impulse in the CEF was, however, diffuse and ecumenical, or absent altogether. The bluff and profane Admiral PrenTalien was much more the standard model than the primly reverential Admiral Ross, and if Rear Admiral Lo Gai Sabr had religion, most were convinced it involved dancing naked under a full moon brandishing the entrails of his enemies. (A visual frequently enlivened by including the admiral’s tall, beautiful, and equally bloody-minded spouse, Senior Captain Yasmin Shariati, a former privateer and the only permanently appointed commodore in the Service. It was not without reason that throughout the lower decks the couple was known as ‘Demon Gin and the Devil’s Dancing Girl’.)
But neither hearts nor souls, frontal lobes nor dancing girls were on the minds of anyone present in Retribution’s CIC that morning. Their enemy’s entrails were another question, as the frustration of the AM’s planning meeting mounted. What the omnisynth’s holographic volume currently displayed was an expanded view of the Hydra, cluttered with routes accessible to grav-lens technology, the much rarer favorable jump nodes, old battlefields, what intelligence they had about slaver activities, Bannerman patrols and other ship movements (often dated), and a spatter of colored pinpricks indicating a meager handful of League-associated settlements.
“Frankly, sir, it’s a real dog’s breakfast.” Senior Lieutenant Elisabeth Gill, head of the Astrogation Department, laid her pointer on the omnisynth’s wide lip. She’d just brought up an overlay of the fuel consumption projected for each of the proposed patrol options, and it was much worse than estimated: the Admiralty’s astrocartography branch had not fully appreciated the degree of local variability here and their charts were obsolete. Like all large warships, Retribution was fitted with an enormous magnetic ram-scoop to garner antimatter from fuel fields (were any available), but given the challenging environments in which the fields were found, this was only done under exceptional circumstances, the task usually being assigned to specially equipped harvesting ships.
Captain Lawrence would have risked it, but it hardly mattered. The New Madras station had sent out deep-probes
and buoys to collect the latest data, which had been downloaded yesterday afternoon. It showed that the few sparse fuel fields, so thin as to be barely worth the trouble, lay far from their assigned sectors. The rest of the squadron, especially the short-winded frigates, would have to feed off Retribution’s fuel reserves, and this necessity was proving to be a very serious limitation.
Nor was it the only one. Amidst the fuzzy volumes that marked out the cruising limits their fuel status restricted them to, Lieutenant Gill had plotted the latest data on tides and currents, as mariners referred to the gravitational lensing phenomena for which the Hydra was noted, and which made it so favorable to grav-lens drives and inhospitable to jump drives. Tides and currents were unpredictable and variable, in the sense that they exhibited fluctuations known as jitter, pulse, and slap (slap being the worst; it was the severe slap that made the famed Rip so deadly), which added to the more prevalent navigational hazards like rip and skeer. A few of the probes sent out to map these conditions had not reported in yet, and that itself was a bad sign.
Gill, not bothering with the pointer, waved a finger at the mess. “You can see how those currents have shifted right across the lanes we want to cover. They’re asymmetric, of course, and nonlinear with respect to mass, so if we go in, anyone downstream will be able to hear us days out, but we probably won’t be able to detect them. And even if we do, it’ll be next to impossible to get a decent read because of the way the lensing distorts phase wakes. They couldn’t have arranged it better if God was their bitch. We might as well send out engraved invitations!” (Liz Gill had had a very long night of it.)
Captain Lawrence looked to Lieutenant Commander Alicia Easley, his conning officer, and Senior Lieutenant Aaron Chimunaya, the lead navigator.
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