Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  “And how would you get there?” Lisa asked gently. “You can’t just book a suite on one of the Hauptman Cartel liners, you know.”

  The devastation of Manticore’s orbital infrastructure had locked down all regularly scheduled civilian shipping routes. Eight passenger liners had been caught at Hephaestus or Vulcan, Sphinx’s equivalent. All of them—and everyone aboard them—had been destroyed. Even Lisa, with all her contacts as First Interstellar’s CEO, didn’t begin to have a complete count on how many freighters and cargo and personnel shuttles had been swept into oblivion along with them. It was going to take time to sort out so much death and destruction.

  “The Navy still has ships in the pipeline,” Sinead replied. “I talked to Terry Patterson day before yesterday.” Her nostrils flared. “Claudia was on Vulcan with her ship. And Peter had gone out to have dinner with her.”

  “Oh, God,” Lisa breathed as the fresh pain hit.

  Commodore Terrence Patterson, Admiral Patricia Givens’ deputy at the Office of Naval Intelligence, had been one of Charles’ personal friends for many years. He and his family had been O’Daley houseguests on dozens of occasions, and her eyes burned as she remembered his daughter, his son-in-law, and their two children…who would never see their mother or father again.

  “I didn’t know,” she said softly, looking at her daughter, and Sinead smiled. It was a sad smile, one that quivered just a bit.

  “I expect it’ll be months before we know everyone we’ve lost.” Her voice was husky, and she cleared her throat almost viciously. “I didn’t know when I screened Terry, either. His yeoman told me before she put me through.” She looked away from her mother. “I almost hung up before he came on the com. I mean, what was I going to say to him after that? But Chief Powell had already told him I was waiting, and I couldn’t just cut and run.” She looked back at Lisa. “And do you know what the very first thing he said to me was?” Her voice turned husky again, wavering around the edges, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “He told me how sorry he was to hear about Hexapuma.”

  “Oh, Sinead.”

  Lisa crossed quickly to the settee and sat beside her. She put her arm around her daughter, and Sinead let her head rest on her mother’s shoulder while her eyes burned. They sat that way for almost a full minute before Sinead drew a deep breath and straightened.

  “Anyway,” she patted her mother’s knee and made her voice sound almost normal, “I knew he wouldn’t have time for idle conversation, given what must be going on at the Admiralty right now. So I went straight to the point and asked him if he thought the attack would affect dependent passages to Spindle.”

  “‘Dependent,’ sweetheart?” Lisa cocked one eyebrow, and Sinead smiled at the welcome edge of humor in her mother’s tone.

  “For certain values of the word, yes, Mother. Especially if it helps get me where I want to be aboard a Navy transport at a time like this.”

  “Oh, I see!” Lisa nodded. “And what did he have to say?”

  “He said he didn’t know.”

  “And this was a surprise to you?”

  “Not really. But he suggested I might ask Captain Mathis over in BuPers, so I did. And he says the Navy’s pulling in every transport it can find. They’re obviously going to have a lot of personnel transfers—God knows they’ll probably have to pull shipyard techs from every station we’ve got just to sort through the wreckage—and until they know where they’re going to be transferring people to and from, all nonessential personnel movement’s on hold.”

  “That sounds less than promising.”

  “At least some transports will still be moving back and forth, Mother. They have to be, however disrupted normal shipping may be,” Sinead said. “And he told me he could put me on the standby list on an as-available basis aboard one of them. I told him to go ahead and do that, but there’s no telling how long I’d have to wait. I thought about taking Kaisers Witz, but Captain Marco told me about her forward alpha nodes.” She smiled crookedly. “I guess it’s lucky he couldn’t get her moved up in the repair queue.”

  Lisa nodded, silently grateful in more than one way that the small but well appointed yacht her own father had commissioned sixty T-years ago had still been waiting for a repair slip on Hephaestus when the attack came in.

  “So it looks like I’m stuck, for now at least,” Sinead conceded. “But I’m not giving up, and Captain Mathis promised to let me know if anything opens up.” She smiled again, less crookedly. “Being married to the man who won at both Monica and Spindle seems to carry a few perks I hadn’t counted on.”

  * * *

  “Captain Lewis?”

  Ginger Lewis looked up from her book reader’s article on gravitics sensor maintenance techniques. There was nothing new in it, but reading old manuals was a lot less depressing than following the news channels.

  “Yes, Senior Chief?”

  “Captain Mathis can see you now, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Senior Chief.”

  She switched off the reader, slid it into her pocket, and followed the petty officer down a remarkably long hall, even for Admiralty House. He turned a corner, then rapped on an old-fashioned, unpowered door, opened it, and stuck his head into the office beyond.

  “Captain Lewis is here, Sir.”

  “Thank you, Clement,” a voice said, and the senior chief stood aside, holding the door for Ginger.

  She stepped through into a moderate-sized office. It was buried too deeply in Admiralty House for windows, but a smart wall was configured to show a busy ski slope, complete with cloudless blue sky, brilliant sunlight, and flying cascades of powder snow as somebody slalomed past the camera. It was probably from someplace on Gryphon, Ginger thought, and felt her mouth stiffen as she thought about what she’d left behind to answer BuPers’ summons. It was only by the grace of God and Vice Admiral Faraday’s surprise evacuation drill that she was still alive. Too many of the people she’d met aboard HMSS Weyland in Gryphon orbit, people who’d begun the process of becoming colleagues and friends, had been less fortunate.

  “Captain Lewis, reporting as ordered, Sir,” she said.

  “Captain.” The extraordinarily tall, heavily tanned, brown-haired officer behind the desk had a pronounced Gryphon accent, which suggested her guess about the ski slope’s location had been on the money, and he stabbed an index finger at a chair. “Sit,” he invited.

  “Thank you, Sir.”

  Ginger sat obediently while he looked back down at a memo on his display. He had to be almost two meters tall, she thought, and dauntingly fit. From the looks of him—and bearing that smart wall in mind—he probably spent a lot of time on skis. Then he looked back up at her with blue eyes which seemed even brighter in that tanned face.

  “I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here,” he said with the air of someone getting right to the point, but then he paused as if inviting a response.

  “I am a little curious, Sir,” she admitted. “Obviously, BuPers needs to find somewhere to put me after what happened to Weyland. Given how…chaotic things are, I didn’t expect to be ordered to report personally at Admiralty House, though.” She smiled faintly. “It seemed like an awful lot of trouble for BuPers to go to where one squeaky new junior-grade captain’s concerned. Especially”—the smile disappeared—“with everything else you have to worry about just now.”

  “Actually, that ‘everything else’ is why you’re here, Captain Lewis,” Mathis told her, and tipped back in his chair, stroking his walrus mustache with an index finger while he considered her.

  “I have a slot to fill,” he said then, “and when I plugged the requirements into the personnel database, your name came out.”

  “May I ask what kind of slot, Sir?”

  “It happens, Captain, that there was a conference on Hephaestus on the twenty-sixth. One of several, I’m sure.” His mouth tightened. “This particular conference, however, was a meeting of ship’s captains and their execs chaired by Vice Admiral Toscarelli.”


  Ginger winced. Anton Toscarelli had been the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Third Space Lord, the CO of the Bureau of Ships. His death aboard Hephaestus had already been announced, but somehow Mathis’ words gave that death an immediacy it hadn’t had before.

  “The reason I mention this,” the other captain continued, “is that among the officers attending that conference were the CO and XO of Charles Ward, one of the new David Taylor FSVs. Her electronics officer was also on the station for a briefing on the newest Lorelei platforms.” He grimaced. “Effectively, that pretty much decapitated the ship’s entire command structure, particularly since the EO had taken along her assistant and the Tacco had hitched a ride to have lunch with his fiancée at Dempsey’s. At that, though, she was luckier than four other ships with senior officers at the Vice Admiral’s conference, because she wasn’t actually docked at the station.”

  Ginger winced again, harder, trying to picture what the loss of every department head except Astrogation and Medical must have done to Charles Ward’s ship’s company. But even as that thought went through her, she felt her interest quickening. If the ship needed a new chief engineer, too…

  “What do you know about the Taylors, Captain?” Mathis asked.

  “Only what I’ve read in the Proceedings,” Ginger admitted. “I know the operational concept behind them, but I’ve never actually seen one, I’m afraid.”

  The Taylors were a new departure in support ships whose pedigree owed at least a little—conceptually, at least—to the Trojan-class AMCs. Far smaller than mammoth repair vessels like HMS Ericsson, whose technicians had helped rebuild Hexapuma after the Battle of Monica, the Taylors ran to around three million tons, only about twenty percent bigger than the new Nike-class battlecruisers.

  The challenge handed to BuShips’ designers had been to produce a “fast combat support vessel” which combined substantial repair capability and a modest capacity as an ammunition/stores ship in a package which was fast enough to stay with a detached force of battlecruisers. The result was the FSV, a ship which could be configured—and reconfigured—at need to fulfill a spectrum of missions, and the result looked…odd the first time someone saw it.

  Oh, the forward twenty percent of a Taylor’s outboard profile looked pretty much like a standard bulk carrier’s hull, with a few other features thrown in. But stretching aft from that was a long, relatively narrow tube—a central core which contained the basic ship systems and life support—that terminated in what looked for all the world like a warship’s after hammerhead. Four full-length ribs projected outward from the core, designed to serve as attachment points to mate the core hull with four quarter-hull section modules. Those modules included straight cargo carrying variants, but also those fitted with machine shops, as ammunition carriers, or even as personnel transport quarters and life support.

  Their smaller dimensions limited the size of the modules they could mount, and the maintenance module had only about twenty percent of an Ericsson’s machine shops and fabricator capacity. It also meant they could carry fewer spares than an Ericsson, even with a cargo module dedicated to that specific purpose, but the dorsal ribs extended beyond the outer profile of the modules—and the permanent hull section—and were fitted as full-length mooring points for the RMN’s standard CUMV(L)s. That created four “cargo racks” that provided a substantial external cargo-carrying capacity, since the various marks of Cargo Unmanned Vehicles (Large) could be used for spares—or for ammunition or general stores. They’d even been provided with a module suitable for turning them into long-term LAC tenders…and they required less than a quarter of an Ericsson’s crew.

  They also had military-grade sidewalls, and they were armed.

  It had always been RMN policy that repair and ammunition ships had no business involving themselves in combat, to begin with, and that hull volume aboard a service ship was too valuable to waste on weapons they wouldn’t need. The Janacek Admiralty, however, had decided differently, and the Taylors were the result. The forward hull section contained a heavier armament than most light cruisers, taking full advantage of the RMN’s off-bore missile capability, and—as part of their Trojan DNA—eight launch bays for LACs.

  The truth was that the Taylors had represented a solution in search of a problem, in Ginger’s opinion, when she’d first heard the scuttlebutt about them. She’d been able to imagine instances in which they’d be valuable, but those instances would be relatively rare, so she’d questioned the diversion of resources into their construction. Unfortunately—or fortunately, she supposed, depending upon one’s viewpoint—the class’s initial units had been well advanced when the People’s Republic of Haven reinitiated hostilities. They’d been pushed to completion to clear the slips for new war construction and, somewhat to the Navy’s (and Ginger Lewis’) surprise, they’d proved extremely useful. There were never enough Navy-owned service ships—especially with the Navy’s expanded role in Silesia, the acquisition of Talbott, and the enormous deployment of relatively light units as part of Operation Lacoön—and none of the “taken up from trade” merchant ships being pressed into service could possibly have matched a Taylor’s sheer versatility. And even though a Taylor cost a good bit more than a “regular” repair ship on a per-ton basis, it cost a lot less in absolute terms, even allowing for its armament and integral LAC squadron. That meant the Navy could build more of them, and despite their Janacek pedigree, BuShips was doing exactly that.

  “Well, you’re about to see one from the inside,” Mathis told her.

  “Yes, Sir,” she said. “I’m not really familiar with how the Taylors’ command structure’s arranged,” she continued. “How does the ship’s engineering department interface with the repair and support component?”

  “It’s all one department,” Mathis replied. “The EO runs both sides of the shop.”

  Ginger suppressed an automatic blink of surprise. It definitely hadn’t worked that way aboard Ericsson.

  “Sir, I’ve never run a dedicated construction or repair department,” Ginger pointed out. “That’s one reason I was assigned to Weyland. I’ve spent almost my entire career in shipboard assignments. The way it was explained to me, BuPers detailed me to Weyland to pick up more ‘yard dog’ expertise, and I’d think that kind of background would be in demand running the engineers aboard something like a Taylor.”

  “That’s all right, Captain. That’s not what you’re going to be doing.”

  “It’s not?” Surprise startled the question out of her, and he snorted.

  “No.” He shook his head. “What we have in mind for you, Captain Lewis, is something a little more challenging. Welcome to your new command.”

  She stared at him in disbelief, and he lifted a chip folio from his blotter. He tossed it across to her, and she caught it automatically, still staring at him.

  “I suggest you get started reading up on your new ship, Captain Lewis,” he told her dryly. “They’re holding a shuttle for you. If we’re lucky, there’ll be time for your personal gear to catch up, but I wouldn’t count on it. Hopefully, you’ll have at least a few days—maybe even a couple of weeks—to settle in. It’s definitely going to take me at least a day or two to round up the rest of your senior officers. But as soon as we can get her squared away, Charles Ward is going to be headed for Talbott.”

  * * *

  “Well, damn,” Henrique Chagas growled as the news feed scrolled up his display aboard the “Hauptman Cartel” freighter decelerating towards Thurso.

  So much for this part of Operation Janus, he thought sourly. Crap.

  It must have been an interesting call for the local news channels, he reflected. On the one hand, advertising to the galaxy at large that you’d just killed two or three million of your own citizens with kinetic strikes that took out entire cities wasn’t exactly good for your star system’s public image. On the other hand, driving that point home for anyone foolish enough to think about emulating Megan MacLean’s revolutionaries had to be prett
y high on Tyler MacCrimmon’s to-do list. And since the “free and independent” news media of the Loomis System did exactly what the Loomis System’s government told it to do, that was exactly the message the newsies had delivered.

  He froze the feed, looking at the imagery of the crater the KEWs had left where the city of Conerock used to be. There’d been no survivors at all from that one, according to the newsies, and it hadn’t been a lot better than that for any of the other targeted cities. That would have been more than enough, he was sure, to have ended the rebellion, but if official reports were to be believed, every single member of the LLF had been killed or captured following the government’s successful assault to retake control of Elgin. Megan MacLean, Erin MacFadzean, Tammas MacPhee, and Tad Ogilvy were all confirmed dead according to Senga MacQuarie’s official communiqués. There was no specific mention of Luíseach MacGill or her husband, which was an interesting omission, but it was depressingly clear the Loomis Liberation Front had been totally crushed.

  And not one frigging mention of the Manties in any of this crap, he thought disgustedly. All that work right down the toilet! He glowered at the ugly hole where Conerock’s neat homes and families had once been and shook his head. You’d think they could’ve taken at least one of the bastards alive and gotten them to talk about their “Manticoran sponsors,” but, no! MacCrimmon and MacQuarie couldn’t even get that right!

  He growled an obscenity, killed the feed, and punched in a com combination. The ship’s captain appeared on his display almost instantly, and Chagas smiled sourly at the worry in the other man’s eyes.

  “Don’t sweat it, Captain,” he said. “Under the circumstances, there’s more than enough ‘local unrest’ hereabouts for a reasonable merchant skipper to give the system a miss until things settle down. Go ahead and jettison the arms shipment just in case, but I think the ‘Hauptman Cartel’ is going to pass on picking up this particular load of seafood.”

  “Yes, Sir.” The captain made no effort to disguise his relief. “Back to Mesa, then, Sir?”