The OpsO talked quietly from his station behind Wilson’s command seat. “Mustang falling back.”
The captain looked at his tac screen. The light cruiser Mustang was slowing and in the process of turning around. Wilson frowned as he punched up Mustang on the comm. He wasn’t in the mood for any BS right now. He asked in a cold tone over the ship to ship channel, “You got a problem?”
The young Mustang captain looked into the screen. “I’m going back to help.”
Wilson shook his head. “You wouldn’t be helping. You’d be dying. We’ve lost this bloody fight. It’s all over except for the crying and finger pointing. There will be other fights, many of them. You need to get ready for those. Now get your ass back in position.” He cut the connection.
He watched the light cruiser speed up and slide back to her original spot. He turned his attention back to the rear guard action. Only the Royal Navy ships were visible in the field of view as the enemy was beyond them. Even on high magnification, his comrades were small dots of lights now. Small but not insufficient. They would never be insufficient. Suddenly, there was a flash amid the lights. A ship had just exploded. He watched until the dots of light faded away—and then he watched a little longer.
Chapter 2
“Goddammit.”
Killian O’Hare replayed the message on her floating screen. The message didn’t change so neither did her response.
“Goddammit.”
She leaned back in her desk chair and stared at the overhead in her day cabin without seeing it. She thought about Pirate Flotilla One. She reflected on their occupation, their lives, and the entire universe. She came to the same conclusion she always came to when thinking along these lines. Yup, the universe sucked. There was no getting around that basic fact and, right now, it really, really sucked. She blew out a long breath. There was also no getting around what she had to do now. She leaned forward and touched a virtual button on a floating screen. Reese Patrick responded from the ops position on the bridge. “Yes, Captain?”
O’Hare talked in a quiet voice. “Please set up a rendezvous with Predator.”
“Predator is in the Altaria System. She is probably a good five days away even if we-.”
“I didn’t ask for a goddamn position report! Set up the rendezvous!”
She was gone. Rip Heron, in the command chair in front of the ops station, heard the exchange. He rotated the chair around and stared at Patrick silently. Both knew what the other was thinking as each was thinking the same thing. Killian O’Hare was not pulling two pirate squadron leaders out of their raiding zones because she suddenly had the urge to have lunch with the old gang. If this was a discussion concerning a proposal or upcoming events, she would have done it by message traffic. If she wanted to complain, she would have done it with a P4. No, there was only one answer to this. She had news, the kind of news that had to be delivered in person. There was just one kind of news that called for that. Heron shook his head slowly and talked quietly. “No way she tells us until just before we rendezvous with Predator.” He pivoted the chair to face the comm station. “Did the captain get any P4s recently?”
The young woman at the comm station replied, “One in the last hour. It was really long.”
Heron nodded. By their very nature, P4s did not list the sender, place, or time of origin, or a subject line. In the communication queue, a P4 showed the addressee and nothing more. The length of the message could not be hidden unless the sender attached junk to it to make it look bigger than it was. Senders rarely did that so the size of the message was usually a clue.
Patrick did a calculated guess. “A big message means images. Got to be intel of some sort.”
Heron nodded slightly. “Yup. Bad news intel. If it was just about Wolfpack, she wouldn’t tell Rafe.” He stared at Patrick for a long moment. “This is really bad.”
Patrick nodded in return and started composing a rally message for Predator. It was transmitted ten minutes later with a copy going to O’Hare.
~ ~ ~
When the message hit Predator, it created the same kind of response among that bridge watch as Patrick and Heron had exhibited. Tactical looked at Baby Doll. Baby Doll looked at Mason Reed. Mason Reed looked at Tactical. Again, veteran space warriors thinking exactly the same thing. They also knew lunch wasn’t on the agenda.
Reed spoke first. “It would take a helluva lot for O’Hare to do this.” His tone was quiet and resigned. Everyone knew this was bad news, it was just a matter of how bad and how difficult it would be to recover from this news. The silent opinion of the group was the news was very bad and not very recoverable, but speculation wouldn’t help so nobody indulged in that particular course of action. They turned to in preparation for the rendezvous.
Baby Doll checked the time tables. “Just over one standard day for their message to get here. Assuming they started toward us immediately after sending the message, it is four days to the rendezvous point.”
“I’ll acknowledge the call back to Nemesis and plot a course,” said Tactical.
“I’ll tell Raferty,” added Reed.
The trio broke up. Word of the rendezvous quickly spread as the ship altered course and speed. Now a sense of foreboding shaded all ship activities. The feeling proved to be prophetic.
~ ~ ~
Four days later, Predator and Nemesis drifted side by side. The shuttle from Nemesis was attaching to Predator’s starboard airlock. After the green lights illuminated, Killian O’Hare stepped through the airlock and into the passageway to be greeted by Hawkins, Tactical, and Baby Doll. She walked past the party without acknowledging any of them. She spoke over her shoulder. “I’ll see you in your day cabin.”
The three exchanged glances as O’Hare moved away. “Good thing only one of us has a day cabin or we wouldn’t know who she was talking to,” Raferty said as he followed the visitor with Tactical and Baby Doll just behind him. Once he turned into his day cabin, the two women moved past that hatch and ran down the short distance of the corridor to the bridge. Mason Reed left the command chair and joined them at the ops station as they called Nemesis.
“Spill it,” Tactical directed Reese Patrick over the comm.
O’Hare had told her crew just prior to departing in the shuttle. Now Patrick told them. There was silence for many seconds. Tactical broke the spell with one softly spoken comment. “Son of a bitch.”
Raferty Hawkins entered his day cabin and stopped two meters inside next to his briefing table. O’Hare had her back to him as she stared down at the chess board on the end table next to the couch along the bulkhead opposite the hatch they had both come through. She reached down and picked up a knight in her right hand. She fiddled with the piece as the silence stretched between them.
“Do you remember playing chess together?” she asked without turning around.
He nodded although O’Hare was not looking at him. “Yes, you and I learned together.” He paused as he drew in memories. “We were eight or nine. Only you and I played together as nobody else was all that interested. Good matches over the years.” He let the train of thought fade as he knew this was just an opening gambit to get into the conversation. He also knew they would get to the real reason soon enough, and he wouldn’t like it at all. He was in no hurry to experience the “not-like-it” feeling so was patiently waiting, knowing O’Hare would get there in her own way.
“Do you play with anyone else now?” She still refused to turn around as she stared down at the knight in her hand. Her voice was quiet and nearly cracked.
“Tactical and I play on occasion. She prefers real tactics and strategy rather than a board game but will humor me on occasion. Skyler Mallory and I played quite a bit. She is a good player, and we…were… evenly-.”
He let the halting sentence go to a silent grave. His mind raced. He had always been good at taking a few random bits of information and creating a whole image from them. He could connect the dots. The skill had saved his life on occasion, but now i
t worked against him. He knew O’Hare received messages from Admiral Lawton Paul Barrett as he did from Skyler Mallory. He knew there was an offensive going in the Aurora Empire. He hadn’t heard from Mallory, but he was now sure O’Hare had heard from Barrett. Now he knew why he hadn’t heard from Skyler Mallory.
“Goddammit,” he said in a whisper.
O’Hare put the knight down and turned. Tears spilled from her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. She moved to engulf him in her arms. Mechanically, his arms folded around her, and they clasped each other tight. Tears rolled down his cheeks now as he clutched O’Hare. For one of the few times in his adult life, Hawkins had absolutely no idea what to do. There had always been a countermove, a pathway out, or an ace up the sleeve. There was always a move that would deliver victory. He couldn’t come up with anything. It was done and there was not a damn thing he could do about it. The fact is, it had been done for many days. Skyler Mallory was gone, and that was all there was to it.
O’Hare whispered in his ear. “There was an offensive. They got their asses kicked. Dozens of ships, thousands of casualties. Her ship was shot to hell, so she commanded the rear guard while others got away. Paul is going to send the debrief when he gets his hands on it. Apparently, it’s the worst defeat since the opening days of the war.”
Hawkins nodded, and she felt the movement. They went quiet, holding each other for dear life. Several minutes passed, but there was no hurry. Time didn’t matter at the moment. Nothing mattered at the moment. He held her for a long time. He wasn’t sure how long, but he knew it wasn’t long enough. He could feel the cast on her lower left arm and wrist pressing against his back. It reminded him how close she had come to dying at Longwall prison on Bolindale. He wanted to hold her forever to protect her and, ultimately, protect himself from the threat of losing her. He also knew that was impossible.
Eventually, Hawkins whispered in her ear. “You have to go.”
She craned her neck back, so they were face to face. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”
He shook his head slightly. “That’s the problem. I will always need you. The longer you stay, the harder it will be to let you leave. I can’t have anything happen to you, and the only way to ensure that would be to keep you next to me forever so if something did happen to you, it would happen to me too. We both know that won’t work.”
She listened and nodded. She knew he was right, but leaving felt like desertion right now, and she would never do that to him. “I’ll stay for a few more minutes.” He nodded, and she put her head back against his shoulder and held him tight. Nobody moved for many more minutes. Neither were in a hurry.
“It’s time,” he said softly.
She brought her head back once more to stare into his eyes. “I love you, Zachary,” she said.
“And I love you, Anastasia,” he responded while holding her gaze. Then he added, “Under no circumstances are you allowed to get killed.”
She gave him a wan smile. “It will never happen.”
They kissed and, through sheer effort, managed to break apart. She moved to the day cabin hatch with him just behind her. He walked her down the corridor to the airlock. They saw nobody during the short trip. They kissed again at the airlock hatch. O’Hare entered the airlock and walk through the short space to her shuttle. Hawkins watched her shuttle depart through the porthole next to the airlock. He looked around the passageway. Predator was just as she was before O’Hare came aboard but, somehow, everything had changed. Or maybe only he had.
With the bridge as its epicenter, word spread throughout the ship like the tremors of an earthquake. Skyler Mallory had been on the Murmansk mission so all the crew serving at that time had met her. They had liked and respected her. A Royal Navy captain had volunteered to share their hardships and dangers on that mission. Senior officers like that were few and far between in any navy. As with all good crews, Predator’s people knew things they had no business knowing, but they knew anyway. They knew Mallory and their captain had been involved. They approved of the match. Some had wildly speculated that Mallory would desert the Royal Navy and join Predator. She would have been welcomed. Now they mourned her.
Blondie heard the news down in engineering. She called the bridge for confirmation and refused to believe it until Tactical personally confirmed it for her. Blondie turned engineering over to Preacher and immediately retired to her stateroom. Predator was a sad ship for many days.
Chapter 3
The Queen of the Aurora Empire stared at the three men who had just finished briefing her on the worse defeat since the war’s initial battles over one standard year ago. Of course, she had already known most of the information provided by her visitors as the defeat had been ten days prior and the media had talked of little else. It became clear to Alexis during the last ten days that the defeat was more serious than the media knew. Alexis based that conclusion on the clear reluctance of these three men to brief her about the battle. Prime Minister Strickland used the excuses of his own pressing work and the difficulty in aligning his schedule with the other two men as means to avoid presenting the brief until he absolutely had to do so. The delay did nothing to mollify the Queen’s anger. Her best friend, Skyler Mallory, was dead along with thousands of other people’s best friends. And sons. And daughters. And husbands. And wives. And so on and so forth. And what had been accomplished? Not a damn thing. No, the delay had done nothing to tamp down the Queen’s ire.
The little bits of new information she received from the three briefers did not make her feel better about the defeat or the resulting situation. This new information was not about the battle itself but more about the effects of the loss. The Royal Navy could not go on another major offensive for at least four months if not longer. There were many indications the OrCons were planning to invade the Glazomer System and the Empire forces there could not hope to hold against a major enemy effort. Shipbuilding was unaffected by the defeat, and the output of new equipment was increasing weekly, but the continuous loss of trained personnel would require another slight cut in the individual ship-manning levels and also meant less experienced crews and officers. The present was bad, and the immediate future was bleak.
The Queen had received the entire brief without a word. After the brief was concluded, Strickland, Admiral Noah Wu, and Defense Minister Douglas Cunningham sat back in their chairs and waited. The Queen’s office was deathly still. She sat straight-backed in her chair with her elbows on the chair’s arms and her hands clasped in front of her. It was the position she had assumed after she had greeted the three men on their arrival. During the twenty-minute brief, she had not so much as twitched a muscle. Her face had remained expressionless. If not for the movement of her eyes as she followed each speaker, one might have concluded she was totally oblivious to anything happening in front of her. Now the silence stretched on until it almost reached the point of uncomfortable before the Queen spoke.
She looked at Strickland as she slowly leaned forward and placed her elbows on the desk followed by her clasped hands. “What is the name of our navy?” she asked in a quiet voice. She then looked at each man in turn while awaiting an answer.
Silence met the question. The three men glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes. They all saw the same thing in each other’s faces. The answer was so obvious they must be interpreting the question incorrectly. There was a catch here somewhere, they just didn’t see it. Nobody responded at first but then Strickland leaned forward in his seat. “Your Majesty?”
She repeated herself slowly and distinctly. “What is the name of our navy?”
Again a few seconds of silence flash flooded the room until Strickland answered in a quiet voice. “The Royal Navy, Madam.”
His manner made it sound more like a question than the answer to a question but the Queen accepted it.
“Exactly,” she agreed. “The Royal Navy. And the last time I checked, the only goddamn royal around here was me!”
Now
her voice rose in anger and vitriol. “My Navy. My Marine Corps. My people. My ships. My bases. My academy. My everything! And you stupid bastards are destroying my navy!!”
Alexis stared at her visitors with near hatred on her face. The three men sat in stunned silence. Usually, the Queen’s weapons of choice were stony silence or biting observations. None of the men had ever heard her curse before or even raise her voice. They looked at each other in disbelief.
As prime minister, it was Strickland’s job to take the hits here. “Your Majesty, I ...”
“Don’t you ‘your majesty’ me!” she replied while reaching into a desk drawer. She brought out three pieces of paper with attached computer plugs and, with a casual flip, slid them across the desk at Strickland. He caught them just as they departed the desktop. He looked at the papers. As he scanned them, his face fixed in confusion. He looked up at her. “Your Majesty?”
“I am issuing a Call-to-Service for one of the peers.” She knew they would have no idea what she was talking about so explained without waiting for the inevitable questions. “A Call-to-Service can be issued by the monarch to a peer to bring that peer to the monarch so the peer can be tasked with a specific mission for a specific time period. Usually, the time period is three months or less. These missions have historically been military missions in times of crisis. Since the last such order was issued over 150 years ago, they were used during a time when the peers occupied the leadership positions in our military. The monarch was simply designating one of these peers to carry out a particular mission. I am doing that now.”
Admiral Wu, the CME, did not have the sheets of paper as Strickland continued to hold them. He asked, “Which peer or peers?”
The Queen looked at him and then glanced at Cunningham seated to the Admiral’s right. Alexis nodded at the Defense Minister. “He knows the name on it.”
Cunningham responded instantly. “The Duke of Black Hallow, of course.” His tone made it sound like the answer was apparent all along. At moments like this, Admiral Wu and Prime Minister Strickland really disliked Cunningham.
Smoke on the Wind Page 2