“We can work around it,” Lieutenant Chimunaya said, leaning forward to highlight the plot, “but it’ll take weeks. And the way things seem to be hopping out there, who knows what we’ll find when we arrive? It’s a stern chase with a chaotic quantity.”
Lawrence looked over at Huron, who was sitting beside Commander Ravenswood. “Get ahead of them?” he commented with a flinty smile.
“Sir,” Commander Ravenswood interjected before Huron could say anything, “I’ve been reviewing the data with Commander Huron, and there may be another issue.”
The captain inclined his head, the smile becoming fixed.
“It’s a bit embarrassing, sir. I’m not sure why GS3 didn’t think of it, but the Commander pointed out that the slaver traffic info GS3 used when they assigned us our patrol sectors is based on intercepts.” That was obvious enough. “But we only get intercepts where we look. There’s a lot of places we don’t.”
Sir Philip received the news with a closed, now-they-tell-me expression. “So your judgment is that the General Staff’s Operations Department lacks a sufficient grasp of slaver activity in the Hydra upon which to base a viable operational plan. Is that it in a nutshell?”
“I doubt they’d agree with that, sir. But on talking with Commander Huron, I concur. Our patrols of the Hydra have been opportunistic, not systematic. That’s mainly what CID’s and ONI’s projections are derived from. They get fed back to GS3 and—”
“Self-fulfilling prophesy. We see what we expect to see because we’ve already seen it.”
“Just so, sir.”
The captain pulled his jaw; something, Kris noted, he’d been doing a lot of. She was sitting next to Huron, on the side opposite Commander Ravenswood, maintaining an obdurate silence. Huron had brought her along to the meeting, saying it would be most edifying, and it was—though not in the way she’d expected.
Now, Sir Phillip fixed his attention on her. Whether he was thinking of crystal balls or ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’, he alone knew. Happily, his question avoided expressing either. Unhappily, Kris wondered if he was laying down a coil of rope in the hope she might hang herself with it.
“Well, Midshipman, you are reputed to know something of these parts. What do you say? Are we looking in the wrong place?”
Feeling like an insect being prepared for mounting, Kris cleared her throat nervously. Twice. “Sir, I—I can’t say really. Slavers do like to lie up doggo and—”
“Doggo, Midshipman?”
“Sorry, sir. I mean they fly a cold ballistic, keel down, so they can’t be heard. Then when they get to a nice tide race, they’ll jump from there. So like the Lieutenant said, even if you hear ‘em—”
“They jump while they’re in a tide race?” Lieutenant Gill and her lead navigator shared a look of mingled horror and disbelief. Attempting a jump under those lensing conditions would introduce all sorts of uncertainties into the convolution calcs, with potentially fatal results.
“Sure,” Kris said, puzzled and unwilling to show it. “If you’re legged enough, you can get away with it.” Harlot’s Ruse was a converted ore carrier, not quite the size of a destroyer but fitted with heavy mass cruiser drives, and that was why. And perhaps she should have said usually get away with it, but that was neither here nor there, as far as their mission was concerned.
“Good lord,” muttered the lieutenant.
“One might presume that they have favored locales for this lying up doggo business?” Sir Phillip inquired, icily polite.
“They do, sir. But I don’t know what any of ‘em are called on your—our—charts. A prime one was Killian's Reach.”
“Killian's Reach,” Sir Phillip repeated, perhaps struck by the name—a romantic-sounding name. “And you might recall something more than a name? Perhaps?”
“Ah—” Kris swallowed against the dryness in her mouth. “They used this little globular cluster as a primary guide ref, and there was an asterism there. I could probably getcha some transform parameters too.”
It wasn’t at all clear that the captain had actually been expecting a constructive answer, but after his eyebrows resettled into their accustomed position, his face relaxed into a more humane expression than it had worn so far that AM.
“Very well, Ms. Kennakris. I’ll ask you to confer with Lieutenant Gill to see if this Killian's Reach can be pinned down. Commander Ravenswood, if you will accompany me, we shall go beat the brass over this execrable fuel situation they have saddled us with. There is, to my certain knowledge, at least one lighter lurking about the station—perhaps two. I mean to possess it before the dogs bark this evening. The rest of you, carry on.”
Two hours later, fresh from a successful campaign to secure a fuel lighter for his squadron, Captain Lawrence saw his xel light up with the face of Lieutenant Gill, wearing a broad and unmilitary grin.
“I think we got it, sir: whiskey-delta four-zero. It’s an old battle zone. Used to be a major nexus, but fifty or sixty years ago, there was a shift and a nasty current set up through there. It shows creep—about an arcsecond and a half per year—and has heavy jitter but not much slap. So it’s manageable, if you’ve got the legs to run it. And there’s so much ancient clutter in there, it’s a great place to lie up and drift if you’re waiting for someone.”
“Can we get there without notifying the entire neighborhood?”
“I believe so, sir. We’ve forwarded the data to Commander Easley for review, but it looks like we can make a deep run and then cut the current at victor-echo four-two. There’s a tributary we can ride awhile and then skate in real shallow. That should set us up nicely.”
“Please be specific about what you mean by awhile, Ms. Gill.”
“Beg your pardon, sir. Six days, sixteen hours—best estimate.”
“Very good, Lieutenant. We shall wait for Ms. Easley’s concurrence, of course, but make Commander Ravenswood aware of your findings, if you please. I should like a preliminary cruise plan within the hour.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Carry on, Lieutenant.”
Furling his xel, he looked over at Huron, who was standing by. “Crystal ball, eh?”
When Huron responded with nothing more than a slight nod and an ambiguous smile, he bobbed his own head once and tugged his angular chin.
“A week, give or take. Well, that gives us some time to work the people up. Best be about it.”
Chapter Four
LSS Retribution
entering Challenger Deeps, en route to Killian's Reach
They went about it, and the crews responded with more zeal than their officers perhaps expected. The prospect of cruising hitherto unpicked regions that might yield a rich harvest spurred them on, and the mariners’ age-old delight in subverting the will of constituted authority helped as well. (Sir Phillip’s orders allowed considerable latitude, but the crews knew they were to cruise far beyond their set bounds and reveled in what they chose to view as taking liberties with the spirit, if not the letter, of the orders.)
Or perhaps it was a deeper feeling, a manifestation of the Navy’s true religion, superseding all others, and still expressed on very formal occasions by the phrase “Her Ladyship’s Battlecruiser” (in the case of LSS Retribution). Luck was the Lady in question, for the CEF was devoted to fortune. Mariners still prayed, as they had for eons (though rarely aloud these days), for ‘a fair wind from the Sun’—among fighter pilots, the formula ran, ‘Good hunting and target-rich environment’—and luck was a quality mariners were exquisitely sensitive to.
By whatever sixth sense mariners used to detect luck, or its absence, the crew of the Retribution had concluded Kris was lucky. This conclusion owed little or nothing to her youth, her beauty, or her peculiar talents (except inasmuch as lucky girls might be expected to be young, beautiful, and peculiarly talented), or her association with Huron, who was likewise considered lucky (with greater justice, given his record). It was more invisible than that, an ancient pagan quality, often besto
wed only fleetingly. Yet with these two aboard, they could hardly avoid having a successful cruise, and they set to their work with a will.
Huron had some sense of this, and regarded it with tolerant amusement. Kris had none, and would have been confused and annoyed if she did. Her ideas of religion—of spirituality in general—were bound up with the notion of ‘church,’ a diffuse residue of her early childhood. Church was pervasive on Parson’s Acre, to the point of essentially defining their society, but Kris and her father, as outsiders, were never fully admitted. She attended church sporadically; there were church services and daily prayer sessions at her school (a good time for a nap), but the essence of it, from the point of view of either community or spirituality, left her untouched. Whether god existed or what the nature of heaven might be were questions she never asked—what hell was like, she had no need to.
So she accepted the smiles, becks and nods, the solicitous “by your leave, ma’am” and “if you’ll permit me, ma’am” to open a hatch or fetch her a sandwich or cup of coffee while she was standing watch (which she always drank, her ambivalent feelings toward the beverage notwithstanding), with a polite and slightly embarrassed incomprehension, which only served to confirm the crew in their judgment.
The view of the officers was rather more complex. Some, like Liz Gill and Tomas Wagner, she’d won over quickly; others remained more guarded. A few were suspicious of her relationship with Huron, but most accepted her with good grace. Their feelings about fortune might be on a different plane than those of the lower decks; they might be more theoretical and couched in the mantras of their profession; but they still existed, and the corporate opinion of the lower decks and the wardroom rarely diverged on this point. Further, they were pleased with the high spirits of the crew and that in itself was contagious.
Kris was pleased at being allowed to do something. True, that something was standing watch, but it was better than nothing. After two days of indulging in every possible variant of thumb-twiddling, she approached Huron privately to ask if “there was anything she could do on this goddamn tub.”
Huron advanced the question, suitably edited, and received a positive response. The first thought, attaching her to Lieutenant Gill’s Astrogation Department (however well supported by the logic of events), did not meet with official approval. Serving in Astrogation in any capacity required at least one of several ratings, ratings no cadet could possibly have, no matter what insights she’d provided. Ignoring that would require a degree of dissimulation in the ship’s log that some captains might have winked at, but not Sir Phillip. The solution was to attach her to Lieutenant Wagner’s sensor watch instead.
That suited Kris fine. Wagner was a decent sort; the mild awkwardness over her status was behind them, and he proved to be friendly enough without being overbearing. He also seemed to be more than a little overawed by Huron, as most of the junior officers were, and her connection there discouraged any unwelcome degree of familiarity.
Her station was on the bridge, and that suited her fine, too—mostly. What she knew about sensors did not qualify her to man a console in CIC (although she couldn’t help but think how much Baz would have loved it there), and she found the bridge far more interesting. Her watch duties were not arduous, and they brought her much better acquainted with how things actually ran on a warship, as opposed to the idealized version presented at the Academy.
The senior personnel of a nominal bridge watch consisted of the Officer of the Deck, the conning officer, and the helmsmen. The Chief of the Watch, the nav watch, and the quartermaster rounded out a typical watch bill. The OOD ran the ship when the captain wasn’t on the bridge (which was most of the time) in accordance with the standing orders. The conning officer seconded the OOD, gave both helmsmen their conning orders (the helmsman who directed the ship in RST, and the G-helmsman, who handled the gravitics), and maintained tactical awareness of all contacts reported by the CIC sensor section, along with any hazards reported by the quartermaster and the nav watch. The Chief of the Watch managed the entire deck watch section throughout the ship, ensuring all stations were properly manned and relieved.
At the Academy, ship comms were typically the conning officer’s responsibility, which was usual for smaller combatants, but Retribution had a signal lieutenant to handle that duty. This officer also acted as the conning officer’s chief assistant, coordinating with the sensor section, which in this case meant coordinating with Kris, who was now the sensor section’s representative on the bridge.
The Signal Lieutenant proper—that is, the head of the battlecruiser’s Signals Department, which embraced both the comms and IT sections—was a lieutenant named Clancy Weber, who was among those not yet reconciled to Kris’s anomalous position, or (as he saw it) the degree of deference she was shown. He was an avid devotee of Sir Phillip, much impressed with the captain’s titles and consequence, rather over-proud of his admittedly detailed knowledge of the technology in his charge, and he talked too much. He had a pinched, nervous, nasal voice (most atypical for a naval officer), and Kris soon came to feel that his talking at all was too much. The other signal lieutenants—whoever had the watch also had the title, be they a lieutenant-jg, an ensign or, in a couple of cases, a grizzled chief petty officer who might have been almost as old as Retribution herself—she found much more congenial.
Fortunately, Weber was only on the bridge when the captain was, most often the forenoon watch. They had assigned her the afternoon and first watches, which gave her the dogs off for dinner and to meet with Huron on those aspects of the mission that weren’t acknowledged in the official op plan. Not that there was much to do in that regard at this point, but she didn’t mind the company either.
Nor did she mind that her watch schedule kept her from seeing much of Captain Lawrence. His Meridian manners were strange and opaque to her, and she couldn’t shake the feeling he was coiling plenty of rope at her feet, hoping that if she didn’t hang herself with it, she might at least trip.
Of Commander Ravenswood, she saw hardly anything at all. The exec’s role was primarily an administrative one, so she spent nearly all her time meeting with the captain or the various department heads, seeing to the myriad details that were involved in the smooth running of the ship. She seemed to be a competent, quiet woman, if quite particular and maybe a bit tense. She hardly said three words to Kris in the first week after she arrived.
Kris came to be much better acquainted with Hrolf Walashek, a kindly, avuncular, colonial lieutenant commander, quite long in grade, who was head of Retribution’s maintenance department and chief damage control officer. His position was somewhat satirically known as the ‘bosun-in-chief’ as the corresponding department head on cruisers and destroyers was a bosun, and thus a senior warrant officer, while frigates had to be content with a chief bosun’s mate. On a dreadnought or fleet carrier, the billet would be filed by a senior commander, and was reckoned to be the second or third most important position on the ship. As such, Walashek ran one of Retribution’s largest departments, and ran it quite well, for all his easy-going manner. He commanded immense respect, and his eccentricities excited no comment beyond the occasional wink.
Walashek was of course no watch stander, but he liked to appear on the bridge in the middle of first watch, always with a mug of coffee strong enough to float an iron wedge, and tell the type of stories old mariners love to indulge in when nothing much is going on. He seemed to have taken a shine to Kris, and when time and circumstances allowed, enjoyed imparting to her some of his inexhaustible knowledge of the finer points, as well as the vagaries, of naval architecture.
Kris also knew something about those vagaries—in regard to slaver ships, that is, as became apparent when they were eleven days out. They had arrived at Killian's Reach as predicted, as pretty a starfall as could be wished, skimming in cold and silent, and almost immediately encountered a great, fat Tyrsenian tender dawdling along quite unconcerned. Captain Lawrence had dispensed with any ‘prattle’—
“damned rogues have nothing to say to me, nor I to them,” was the way he put it—and dispatched his boats: four cutters packed with marines and a covering force of armed pinnaces.
Whatever sort of watch the Tyrsenians kept, it was clearly lacking, for the boats swam quietly out of the dark, masking their signatures by coming in behind the engine cluster, and before any alarm was given, the boarding lampreys had latched on and ripped open the hatches, while Retribution’s EW section made sure no messages could be sent. The armored marines stormed the tender, made short work of the dazed and gawping crew almost before they could rouse themselves, and found nearly six hundred recently taken slaves.
Interrogating the survivors, they learned the tender had four consorts, sleek, well-armed raiders who’d been preying on nearby systems for over two months. They had gone much farther afield this last trip, seeking richer pickings among settlements that had been purposely left alone to replenish what they called their “stock”, and were expected to return shortly—a couple of day cycles at most.
Captain Lawrence pulled his squadron back to a safe distance, all but the stealth frigate Kestrel and the pinnaces, and left his marines to prepare a welcoming party. It was a bit of a risk, should the slavers show up all at once, but not much of one, for that was unlikely, and Kestrel should, in any case, be able to give them enough warning to intervene, if necessary.
As it turned out, nothing of the kind was necessary. The Tyrsenians, smug with the belief that they were far out of harm's way in this isolated patch where no League ship had ever been seen, had not even bothered with recognition codes. One after the other, the four ships glided in, docked with no more than “by your leave—welcome back” and waltzed smiling into the arms of the waiting marines.
A few lost their heads, at first figuratively and then literally, but most went along meekly enough. None, on Kris’s review, were really worth keeping, but they had other uses.
The Loralynn Kennakris series Boxed Set Page 42