Rumors of War

by Jake Elwood

  Not right near me, at any rate.

  He arrived, panting, in the aft section, all too aware that he had never actually been to Operations. In fact, he realized this was his first time in the aft section. Operations, however, was as well-signed as Brady had promised. He ran down a short ladder and found a pair of marines on either side of a hatch. The marines, busy pulling on firefighting gear, ignored him as he stepped between them.

  Operations was a smaller version of the bridge, without any windows. Every bridge function was replicated there. A thick-bodied man in his forties sat in the command chair, the flattened hair on one side of his head revealing that he'd been asleep just a few minutes before. He had the same air of absolute authority as Nishida. Tom didn't need to see the two and a half stripes of an overcommander on his chest to recognize Hiram Boudreau, the First Officer.

  Tom moved out of the doorway, then hesitated. His Battle Stations post was Operations, but that was as far as his instructions went. He had no idea what he was actually supposed to do.

  "Watch bogies One and Two," Boudreau said. "Stand by manoeuvering thrusters." He looked around the bridge, spotted Tom, and said "Thrush! Get to your post."

  "I'm sorry, Sir. I don't know what my post is."

  "Helm," Boudreau barked. "Take over for O'Reilly."

  O'Reilly was a short, chunky spacer with dark hair that was going gray. He stepped aside as Tom joined him. The two of them stood side-by-side in front of the console.

  "Bogie One is making another run from aft," the woman said.

  "Evading," said another voice. Then, "We just lost bridge control."

  "Helm," said Boudreau. "Take us up fifty meters and bring us around to a heading of 172."

  Tom stared helplessly at the console, which was unlike anything he'd seen in training.

  "Helm!"

  "Sir," said O'Reilly. "May I?"

  "Yes." Tom backed up, then watched as O'Reilly activated the thrusters on the underside of the ship. The ship rose, then stopped as thrusters on her topside fired. Tom couldn't feel any motion, but a wireframe projection of the ship turned gracefully on the console screen as O'Reilly brought the ship around.

  The Kestrel was in combat, whether real or feigned Tom couldn't be certain. It was maddeningly difficult to tell what was actually going on. He could only watch as O'Reilly worked the helm controls. There seemed to be four attackers, and Boudreau, like a conductor with an orchestra, managed the helm and weapons. He sent marines running to damage control, and made a broadcast to the entire ship calling for the evacuation of the forward section.

  The lieutenant at the tactical station announced the destruction of one enemy ship. A moment later, the Operations room went dark. The lights came back after a couple of seconds, but every console displayed a yellow outline showing it was in information mode.

  "Direct hit to the aft section," Boudreau said wearily. "We're all dead." He looked around the room. "Good work, Carstairs. June, you were a bit slow." His eyes came to rest on Tom. "Mr. Thrush. Do I need to tell you what I think of your performance?"

  "No, Sir."

  "Perhaps you think the backwards little navy of a planet like New Haven is beneath you. Perhaps you think you don't need to prepare." He glared at Tom, not with the affected scorn of a trainer but with real bitterness. "You are mistaken." He turned away before Tom could reply, giving a mix of praise and criticism to the rest of the Operations crew.

  "This is the captain," said a cool voice over the speakers in the ceiling. "The drill is concluded. We have a good deal of room for improvement."

  There was a wry chuckle from some of the Operations crew. Tom didn't join in.

  "Those of you whose performance was less than ideal, you know what you need to work on. This will not be our last drill, so make sure you're ready."

  "Stand down," said Boudreau. He stood, stretched, and winced as his back cracked audibly. "I'm going back to bed."

  Bed, thought Tom. The idea held no appeal for him. He was far too wound up to sleep. He glanced at his bracer. He was due to get up in less than an hour. He glanced at O'Reilly, thought about asking the man to teach him about the helm console, then decided he was too embarrassed to stay in Operations. Gathering what dignity he could muster, he slipped out into the corridor.

  Up to this point he'd been too busy to do more than glance at the desk in his cabin. Now he activated the desk, and was delighted to find it could replicate any console on the ship. He configured it to reproduce the helm station in Operations and started to play.

  An hour later he was on his way to the wardroom, his head swimming with technical details. He'd spent more time reading about the console than actually using it, and he felt as if he knew less then when he'd started. A figure in the corridor ahead of him moved aside to let him pass, and Tom glanced up.

  It was O'Reilly, and Tom held up a hand, stopping him. "O'Reilly. Do you have a moment?"

  "Of course, Sir."

  Tom glanced around. No one else was in earshot. "It's nothing urgent," he said. "Apparently nothing I do is urgent." He grimaced. "If you have something to do, that's fine. My questions can wait."

  "My shift's over," said O'Reilly. "I'm just on my way to buy some more toothpaste. It'll keep."

  "Thank you." Tom scratched his head. "I'm trying to learn the backup navigation console." He shrugged. "Better late than never, right?"

  O'Reilly smiled.

  "It's controlled from the bridge, right? We don't get control unless the bridge gives us control?"

  "Technically," said O'Reilly, "the bridge stops us from taking control. There's a constant suppression signal, and if it stops, the Operations console becomes live." He shrugged. "It seems kind of backwards, but it means if something happens on the bridge, we can still steer the ship, even if they didn't have a chance to hand over control."

  "All right," Tom said. "That makes sense." He shook his head, trying to choose a meaningful question from the confused jumble in his mind. "What's the AQT?" he said at last.

  "That's how you adjust the gyroscope, so you can pick what direction is forward, or up or down."

  "Yes, I understand what it does, but what do the letters stand for?" Tom made a frustrated gesture. "There's so many acronyms. I finally figured out that VMT means Ventral Manoeuvering Thrusters, but what's AQT?"

  "Well, that's …" O'Reilly paused, thinking. "You know, Sir, I'm not sure what it stands for." He grinned and shook his head. "I never thought about it."

  "Oh." Tom frowned. "I feel like there's so much I don't know, but I don't know what to ask."

  "Well," O'Reilly said, "I can give you one tip. When you need to change orientation quickly, you can do it with a hand gesture." He demonstrated with a twist of his wrist. "You turn the ship using the big icon in the top right. It takes a long time for a tub this big to move around, so you get it started, and while it's turning you can enter the exact number. That way you're not just standing there tapping the screen while the First gets impatient."

  "All right," said Tom. "Thanks. I'll let you get on with … whatever you're doing."

  O'Reilly nodded and continued down the corridor. Tom headed forward to the wardroom. Brady was already there, a steward placing a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her. Tom sat down across from her and used the tabletop to order oatmeal and toast.

  As soon as the steward left the room, Brady said, "I hear you need to learn the Auxiliary Navigation console."

  "I'm working on it, Ma'am."

  "Good." She coiled a strip of bacon around her fork. "There's another drill in about an hour. I don't want you to go to Operations, though." She popped the bacon in her mouth, and Tom had to wait while she chewed and swallowed. "I want you to go to Gun Station Bravo. Don't get in the way. Just watch how they work."

  "Aye aye, Ma'am."

  In a real battle the computer would fire the guns, with faster response times and more accuracy than any human could ever manage. Electronic systems could be scrambled, though, so there w
as always a human crew ready to take over the guns during a crisis.

  "Now. You've met the captain and the first officer. Who's third in command?"

  Tom gave her a blank look, then reached for his bracer.

  "It's Commander Holmes," she said. "After that … You know, after that I'm not entirely sure. We have five lieutenants on board, six counting you, but I'm not sure who's senior."

  Tom said, "Dr. Vinduly is an overcommander." As soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew he'd blundered. "But he's not in the chain of command."

  "Right," said Brady. "Is there anyone else who's an officer but not in line for command?"

  "The Engineering Officer," Tom said. "I forget his name."

  "Her name," Brady said. "It's Lieutenant Sawyer. On a larger ship there might be dentists or other specialists who are officers outside the chain of command. And there's a marine lieutenant with no authority over naval personnel. In theory any orders you give to the marines should go through him. In practice, of course, they'll do as you say. But Marine Lieutenant Harper can override you."

  He met Harper during the next drill. The marine lieutenant rushed into the gun bay with a pair of marines in firefighting gear when the ship's computer announced the bay had taken damage. Harper was polite enough while making it clear he expected Tom to stay out of his way. The marines followed his lead.

  There was no fire, of course. No one was going to start a blaze in the confined environment of a spaceship, not for a drill. Harper had each of his marines go through the steps of using their equipment, stopping short of actually deploying fire-retardant foam. He quizzed them on what to do in the event of an electrical fire, and what to do if the compartment lost air pressure. Tom was amused to learn that their focus was on saving the spacers, who they assumed would be completely unable to help themselves.

  It struck him that the marines were their own separate community aboard the Kestrel. The New Haven military had no Marine Corps. The marines were UW imports, like Tom and Brady and a handful of spacers, but they didn’t mingle. He'd never seen Harper in the wardroom. He never saw a marine in the company of anyone but another marine.

  It seemed a shame. During Officer Training, Army, Navy, Cavalry, and Marine officers had trained together. The armed services had felt like a single fraternity to Tom, and it saddened him to see this degree of fragmentation. The abyss between Havenites and UW personnel was bad enough. The ship didn't need more division.

  The marines even had a different cultural background. Harper and both marines who showed up for the drill were from Daphne, which had joined the UW only a few years before. People from Daphne had a distinct drawling accent, and a sense of being a bit apart from the other United Worlds. Daphne had one of the weakest economies in the UW, and Daffies (as they liked to call themselves) tended to leave their home world in search of work. The armed services were a popular choice, and they invariably chose the Marine Corps.

  When the drill was over the captain addressed the crew, giving her usual post-mortem, complimenting some groups and criticizing others.

  Once she was finished, Tom's bracer chimed. It was Brady, summoning him to the boardroom. He arrived to find another lieutenant in conference with a pair of spacers. Brady sat at the far end of the long table, and she rose when she saw him. "Walk with me."

  They paced through the corridors of the forward section. "You're getting a team for Battle Stations drills," she said. "It's Boudreau's idea, which makes me think it isn't going to go well."

  He glanced at her, startled.

  "I hate getting into shipboard politics," she said, grimacing. "That kind of bullshit should be beneath us as navy officers. But every ship has its politics, and this ship has politics that make the rest of the fleet look like a flying utopia." She paused as the hatch to General Storage Three slid open and a medical corpsman came out, arms full of packages. Tom watched him pass, wondering if the man had properly logged the supplies. If I have to re-verify the whole storeroom …

  Brady waited until the man was out of earshot before continuing. "Commander Boudreau has … disappointed me." Her tone was carefully neutral, but her expression was full of distaste. "He's got a bug in his craw about joining the United Worlds. He doesn't like the captain, he doesn't like me, and he doesn't like you."

  "But-"

  She held up a hand, silencing him. "Don't bother telling me it's not fair. It's how things are. He's found ways to undermine me. I've got a solid track record, though, so there isn't much he can do to me. It's you I'm worried about."

  Tom gave her an alarmed look.

  "I was annoyed when he was ignoring you," she said. "Now he's taking an active interest, and that is likely to be worse." She stared at him. "He's your nominal supervisor, even if he's been acting like you don't exist. At the end of three months he'll submit your first evaluation, which will determine your eligibility for promotion to full lieutenant."

  Tom swallowed. If he didn’t make his first promotion it would be a huge black mark on his record. He could find himself cashiered, or relegated to clerical duty groundside for the duration of his service.

  "Now, there's a lot of regulations in place to protect babes in the woods like yourself. If he wants to declare you unfit for promotion he'll need documented evidence of incompetence or dereliction of duty." She grinned. "And, before you ask, none of your little mistakes so far will qualify. Every half-bar makes mistakes. I hear you handled the Operations helm controls adequately during the latest drill."

  He nodded.

  "No doubt annoying our first officer greatly in the process." She smirked. "No, you'll have to fail repeatedly despite written warnings if he wants his evaluation to stick." She stopped. "Which brings us to Gun Station Bravo."

  They stood beside a hatch with an ID scanner and a stenciled label that read GS BRAVO.

  "The forward magazine is directly to starboard," she said. "In fact, it's right between Alpha and Bravo gun stations, which is more common sense than ship builders usually display."

  Tom gave her a noncommittal nod. Ship design was not entirely unlike architectural design. He had some sympathy for those anonymous designers who had to juggle an impossible number of conflicting demands as they laid out the map of a ship.

  "The problem is, the magazine holds less than ten thousand rounds. That's shared by two guns, mind you." Her gaze sharpened. "How long can two guns maintain uninterrupted fire with ninety-five hundred rounds?"

  "Let me see …. Two – no, wait. I'm thinking of Harris guns." Harris guns, designed as an anti-missile defense, had a fantastically high rate of fire. Relying on volume over accuracy, they essentially surrounded a ship in a cloud of steel. The Kestrel, though, used lasers for anti-missile defense. Her guns were Conklin and Mercer 30mm cannons. Designed as close-range ship-to-ship weapons, the cannons fired explosive rounds at a much slower rate.

  "Slightly less than ten minutes," he said at last.

  "You know, you could have used your bracer." She chuckled. "It's nine minutes, fifty-three seconds, to be precise. Now, what happens when ten minutes are up?"

  "The guns keep firing," Tom said. "The magazine remains full, because there's a loading chain that runs down the spine from the aft magazine."

  Brady's eyebrows rose. "You've been doing your homework. Good. Now, the problem with this scenario is, the spine is vulnerable. It has less armor plating than the rest of the ship, and the loading chain runs just under the hull plates. It's not an issue when we're carrying cargo pods. They provide plenty of protection. Without them, though, any damage to the loading chain means we're ten minutes away from losing our forward guns. That's where you come in."

  "Okay …"

  "The good news is, it's pretty straightforward. The bad news is, it's a pain in the neck. The next drill will simulate a damaged chain. You're going to deliver another ten thousand rounds to the forward magazine, manually." She grinned at his expression. "Don't worry, you don't have to do it single-handedly. Come on. Let's go me
et your team."

  The team, he was dismayed to find, included Hanson. The man stared at Tom, eyes hard and unfriendly, while Brady made introductions.

  "You remember Hanson and Nguyen. This is Spacer Swanson." Brady indicated a black woman in her mid-twenties. "Tech One Haskell." She nodded to a heavyset blond man in his thirties. "And this is Tech One Carver." She indicated a tall, slender black man who looked almost as young as Tom.

  "The drill is scheduled for 13:00. I suggest you prepare." With that, she left them.

  None of them had done this exact drill before. They worked together, sorting out the details as they went. Hanson watched the proceedings with the sullen air of a small child who's been refused a candy, but the others treated it like a challenge and an interesting break to their usual routine.

  Ten thousand 30mm cannon rounds, they soon discovered, were a serious pain to move. Tom stood in the aft magazine, looking at tall racks full of thousand-round cases, and realized why he'd been given such a large team. He tried to lift a case, managed to raise one end a few centimeters, and let it down with a dismayed grunt. "This thing weighs a tonne." It was an exaggeration, but not much of one. "How are we going to move ten of them?"

  "With a grav sled, obviously." It was the first time Hanson had spoken. "We lug it to the vator, run forward, and take it out at the other end."

  "Explain, please," said Tom.

  Hanson sighed and rolled his eyes. "It's pretty obvious."

  "Stow the attitude. I won't tell you again."

  For an instant fury flashed in Hanson's eyes. He suppressed it with a visible effort. "You can't order me to think you know what you're doing. It doesn't work that way."

  Tom, his own anger rising to match Hanson's, forced himself to keep his expression bland. Don't let him know he's getting under your skin. "No. But I can decide you're insubordinate. I can enter a formal reprimand on your record and dock you a day's pay." Tom thought for a moment. By the time the ship reached Garnet they would be at the end of more than two weeks of continuous duty. They'd be overdue for shore leave. He smiled nastily. "I bet I could get your shore leave canceled. So go ahead and keep pushing me."