by David Weber
"That's not a bad idea at all, Loretta," Khumalo said approvingly. "She'd be big enough to make the point that we're serious, but she'd still officially be 'only' a destroyer. And as you say, Admiral Cortez is going to be handpicking their COs. I doubt we'll be lucky enough to get another Terekhov out of the deal, but whoever we do get is definitely going to be first-string."
"And delaying until we get additional units from home would make it clear we're moving deliberately, not rushing around in some sort of panic," Medusa agreed.
"Not to mention the fact that Admiral Gold Peak would probably appreciate it if we didn't start chopping up her squadron into penny-packets before she even gets back here so we can at least discuss it with her," Khumalo added with a chuckle. "Not without a real emergency to justify it, at any rate!"
Vice Admiral Jessup Blaine tried not to feel too bored as he worked his way through the routine reports and paperwork. It was nice to have his own task group to command, and to have two full squadrons of pod-laying ships of the wall at his beck and call, as it were. And it was nice that Quentin O'Malley's battlecruisers had returned to him from Monica.
It was also boring. There simply wasn't very much for a fleet commander to do, assuming he had a competent staff (and Blaine did), when he was tied down to picket duty, however large or important the picket in question might be. He certainly couldn't go looking for trouble, and there were only so many wargames, simulations, and exercises which he could contrive. Exercises against the fortresses protecting the Lynx Terminus, two-thirds of which were now fully on-line, were actually more interesting, and he'd been impressed by the fortresses' capabilities. Aside from that, though, all he really had to do was to hover in the background, like a watching, distant presence, while his staff and his squadron and starship commanders got on with the interesting bits of training and administering their commands.
Oh, stop whining,Jessup! he told himself severely. When you were a captain, you thought the XO had all the real fun. And when you were an XO, you thought it was the department heads. And when you were a department head, you thought it was the division officers. Which was probably pretty much true, now that I think about it.
His lips twitched in a smile at the thought, and he scrawled his electronic signature and thumbprint across the signature block of yet another fascinating report on the status of his attached repair ships' inventories of spare emitter heads for laser clusters. Precisely why he had to sign off on that was one of life's little mysteries.
I'll bet Admiral D'Orville doesn't sign off on parts inventories. Blaine took a certain perverse satisfaction from the thought. He's probably got some staff weenie hidden away down in the bowels of his flagship to take care of things like that. And well he should, too. In fact, I ought to take a look around and find someone Icould dump it—
His thoughts broke off as a lurid priority icon flashed suddenly and shockingly in the corner of his display. He stared at it for perhaps a heartbeat or two. In his entire naval career, he had never seen that particular icon outside a training exercise or a drill, a tiny corner of his brain reflected, and his hand flashed out to stand the acceptance key.
"Blaine!" he snapped the instant his flagship's communications officer of the watch appeared on the display. The officer looking out of it at him looked absurdly young to hold senior lieutenant's rank, and her youthful face was paper-white.
"I'm sorry to disturb you, Admiral," she said, speaking so rapidly the words blurred together at the edges. "We just received a priority message from the Admiralty. It's Code Zulu, Sir!"
For just a moment, Blaine felt the breath freeze in his chest. She had to be mistaken, a part of his mind tried to insist. Either that, or he must have misunderstood her. In naval use, Code Zulu had only one meaning: invasion imminent. But no one, not even the Peeps, could be crazy enough to take on the defenses of the Manticoran home system!
"Is there an enemy strength estimate attached, Lieutenant?"
Blaine was astounded by how calm his own voice sounded. It certainly wasn't because he felt particularly calm! In fact, he realized distantly, it was purely a reaction to the lieutenant's expression and the tension sputtering like a shorting power cable just under the surface of her voice.
"Yes, Sir, there is." The communications officer drew a deep breath, and despite everything, Blaine felt a flicker of amusement at her automatic response to the steadying influence of his own tone. But that amusement didn't last long.
"The Admiralty's initial assessment is a minimum of three hundred of the wall, Sir," she said. "Initial course projections indicate they're headed directly for Sphinx on a least-time approach."
Blaine felt as if someone had just slugged him in the belly. Three hundred of the wall? That was . . . that wasinsane. The one thing Thomas Theisman had persistently refused to do as the Republic of Haven's Secretary of War was to commit the men and women under his command to the sort of death-ride offensives the Committee of Public Safety had once demanded of them.
But maybe it isn't a death ride, Blaine thought around the icy wind blowing through the marrow of his bones.Three hundred wallers . . . probably towing max pod loads . . . and with D'Orville forced to position himself to cover the Junction, as well . . .
Jesus Christ, he realized suddenly, coldly. This could actually work for them! And if it does . . .
"Immediate signal to all squadron and divisional commanders," he heard his voice telling the lieutenant on his display.
"Yes, Sir." The young woman's relief as she found herself doing something comfortingly familiar was obvious. "Live mike, Sir," she said a moment later.
"People," Blaine told his pickup, "they need us back home. Activate Ops Plan Homecoming immediately. I want your impellers up and your ships moving in thirty minutes. Blaine, clear."
The lieutenant tapped a control, then looked back up at him.
"Clean copy, Sir," she confirmed.
"Attach the complete text of the Admiralty's dispatch," he instructed her.
"Yes, Sir!"
"Then get it sent, Lieutenant. Get it sent."
Blaine killed the connection, and as he started to punch in his chief of staff's com combination with the emergency priority code, his earlier thoughts about training exercises flickered through the back of his mind like summer sheet lightning on a distant horizon. At least they had exercised Plan Homecoming, the movement order for an emergency return to the home system. Not that anyone had ever truly expected to need it.
Like my father always used to say, you never do really need something important . . . until you need it bad. Funny. I always thought he was being overly pessimistic.
"Yes, Sir?" His chief of staff appeared on his display, dressed in a sweatsuit and mopping perspiration off his forehead and cheeks with a hand towel. Behind him, Blaine could just see a frozen basketball game.
"I'm afraid your game's just been canceled, Jack," Blaine told him. "It seems we have a little problem."
Chapter Thirty-Two
"That was good work picking up the contact, Pettigrew," Lieutenant Abigail Hearns said. "We need to be a little quicker on updating the ID on bogeys, though."
"Yes, My Lady," Sensor Tech First-Class Isaiah Pettigrew replied almost humbly, and Abigail managed not to grit her teeth.
The tall, lanky sensor tech's accent was just as soft, with just as much of a slight lilt, as her own. In many ways, hearing it was a deeply soothing reminder of who she was, since she'd been away from home for so long. In other ways, though, what she most wanted to do was to strangle Pettigrew—and a handful of other Graysons in HMS Tristram's company—with her bare hands.
It's not really his fault, she told herself . . . again. He's from Grayson. He can't forget that Daddy is Steadholder Owens, which makes me Miss Owens, not just Lieutenant Hearns. I suppose that's why he can't seem to remember the word "Ma'am" when he talks to me. And, irritating as that is, I could probably live with it, if he'd only stop looking like he wants to go down on one knee and kiss
my hand whenever Italk to him!
Somehow, of all the problems she'd envisioned facing on the day she returned to her birth world's navy, this one hadn't occurred to her, and it should have. She'd been too focused on Grayson's long-standing prohibition against seeing its wives and daughters serving in the military, worried too much about whether or not Grayson males would be prepared to accept a female Grayson voice of command as well as they had become accustomed to accepting female Manticoran voices from Steadholder Harrington and the other "loaners" from the RMN. She'd braced herself for dealing with subordinates who found it hard to believe any proper Grayson girl could be a "real officer," but she'd never considered how more traditional Grayson males might respond to the almost genetic-level social and religious programming of their birth society.
Pettigrew was the product of a very traditional Grayson rearing. He couldn't seem to get past the deference due to the daughter of any steadholder, which could be a real problem for Abigail, considering that she was the most junior of Tristram's department heads. She already labored under the distinction of being the only member of the ship's company who was permanently assigned her own bodyguard, as Grayson law required. Mateo Gutierrez, her towering personal armsman, had fitted himself as neatly into Tristram's small ship's company as he had into Hexapuma's, but everyone knew he was there, and she suspected that some of her Manticoran-born fellows thought his presence was just the sort of pretension to be expected out of Neobarbs. And the sort of special consideration which was bound to give her a vastly inflated sense of her own importance. She didn't need any of the other lieutenants aboard who were senior to her deciding that the Grayson members of the crew accorded her greater respect and obedience than they did anyone else, either. Nor, for that matter, did Abigail like it very much, herself. One of the things she'd loved about her experience in the Royal Manticoran Navy was that as far as most Manties were concerned, she was only Lieutenant Hearns. No one wasted a lot of time kowtowing to her, or looking as desperately eager to please as puppies.
Even that, though, bothered her less in a lot of respects than the obvious conflict between Pettigrew's naval discipline and training, on the one hand, and the ingrained Grayson belief that women were to be protected at all costs. And not just from the physical dangers of the universe. Oh, no. They were to be protected from anything which might offend their delicate sensibilities, as well! Pettigrew had imbibed that notion with his mother's milk, and it showed.
You've only been aboard ship for six days, Abigail, she reminded herself. It might be just a little bit early yet to be letting your frustration quotient rise so high, don't you think? Besides, at least thirty percent of the ship's company is Grayson.
"I'm not saying you didn't do an excellent job over all, Pettigrew," she said out loud. "I'm just saying we need to move a bit more quickly working the contacts through to a positive identification, at least by class."
"Yes, My Lady. I understand."
Abigail bit her tongue before she reminded him—again—that she'd specifically told him, and all the other Graysons in her department, that she was a naval officer, to be addressed as such, and not as what was for all intents and purposes a Grayson princess.
I do need to make that point to him again, but not right now, she thought.
The tactical simulator was fully manned, and only three of the people in it, aside from Abigail herself, were Graysons. So far, most of her Manticoran personnel seemed to be taking their Grayson crewmates' peculiarities pretty much in stride. The fact that Manticore had its own aristocracy probably helped in that respect, although even now not all Manticorans seemed prepared to take Grayson titles quite seriously. But Abigail had decided at the outset that she couldn't accept one set of responses from Manticorans and another from Graysons. She'd seen enough evidence of what allowing cliques to form aboard a warship could do to its internal cohesiveness.Her department was going to be composed of people who were all members of the same ship's company, not internally divided into "us" and "them," Manticorans and Graysons. At the same time, she didn't want to hammer Pettigrew. For one thing, much as it irritated her, he hadn't really done anything to be hammered for. And, for another thing, reprimanding him for the way he addressed her would only draw attention to the very fault lines she was determined to eradicate in the first place.
"All right," she said instead, her tranquil tone revealing none of her internal thoughts as she turned to Missile Tech 1/c Naomi Kaneshiro and the next point of her post-simulation critique of the exercise Lieutenant (JG) Gladys Molyneux, Tristram's most junior tactical officer had just conducted while Abigal monitored. "Kaneshiro, when Bogey Two started to swing wide of the wing escort and Lieutenant Molyneux designated her asTristram's primary target, your section was a bit slow to paint her properly."
Despite her rate and an almost unbroken string of "Excellent" and "Superior" evaluations from her instructors, Kaneshiro was very young, even younger than Helen Zilwicki. She was also fresh out of school, where she'd completed the testing for her first-class rate less than three weeks before reporting aboardTristram. She'd borne up well under the burden of having the same first name as her commanding officer (for which, Abigail knew, she had been ribbed unmercifully for the first week or so) but it was evident to Abigail that Kaneshiro was also one of those people who took failure as an affront, rather than a challenge, and she watched the missile tech hovering on the brink of protesting her criticism. Abigail waited a moment or two to see if the other woman's obvious sense of ill use would actually spill over into disputing a superior officer's comments, but Kaneshiro rather visibly sat on her resentment.
"I realize you suffered a computer glitch," Abigail continued calmly when Kaneshiro kept her mouth shut. "In fact, that may be one of the reasons why I noticed it so specifically. I knew that glitch had been programmed into the sim, and I was watching to see how well we handled it. You responded quickly and well when you realized you were going to have to paint the target manually, but it took you longer to realize that than it ought to have. Longer than we might have in an actual combat situation. You need to be better prepared for the possibility of equipment failure. We all do. That's one of the points this simulation was intended to make. And the reason it was intended to make that point is that we all learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. Just between you and me, I'd prefer to do as much as possible of that kind of learning in a simulation instead of when missiles are flying for real."
"Yes, Ma'am." Kaneshiro' acknowledgment came out a bit stiffly but without that edge of personal resentment Abigail had initially detected.
"All right." Abigail checked that point off on her memo pad and turned to the next one. "This one is more in the nature of a general observation. I realize we haven't been together long, and we're still at an earlier point in shaking down the department and the ship than we really ought to be. Unfortunately, the time between here and Spindle is all the time we have before we're likely to find ourselves tasked for deployment somewhere in the Quadrant. That doesn't give us very long to knock off our rough edges. I've discussed this with Captain Kaplan, and she's discussed it with Commodore Chatterjee, and the result is that we're going to be having a little competition."
She smiled slightly as a ripple of what might have been consternation or even apprehension flowed through the simulator.
"Starting the day after tomorrow," she continued, "we're going to begin a squadron-wide 'Top Gun' contest. Commodore Chatterjee and Commander DesMoines are going to design the problems and assign tasks. The first phase will be a direct competition between just the tactical departments of the squadron's ships, and we'll duke it out in a straight simulator-on simulator link.But—" she smiled again, much more thinly "—once we've made the first cut and winnowed it down to the best ship from each division, we'll go up against each other in real-time and real space. It'll be every department in the ship, then, people, not just us, but all the others are going to be relying on us to get our job done righ
t. I wouldn't want anyone to feel particularly pressured, but I suppose I ought to point out that if we don't get our job done right and at least make the first cut, I'm going to be . . . unhappy. And, trust me, you really won't like me very much when I'm unhappy."
"Jesus," Lieutenant Wanda O'Reilly's voice was quiet but harsh as she leaned slightly across the table towards Lieutenant Vincenzo Fonzarelli inTristram's wardroom. "Who had this frigging brainstorm?"
Fonzarelli,Tristram's chief engineer, took his time sipping from his beer mug while he considered O'Reilly thoughtfully. Like the rest of the destroyer's company, her officers were split between Manticorans and Graysons. Unlike the rest of Tristram's company, they were split just about evenly, and O'Reilly was one of the Manticorans who seemed to have a bit of a problem with that.
And with one of those Graysons in particular, I'd say, Fonzarelli reflected. The idiot.
"As a matter of fact," the engineer said mildly, lowering his mug, "I believe the Skipper came up with the notion of making it a squadron-wide, winner-take-all competition. The original idea of having the ships exercise against each other, though, came from Lieutenant Hearns, I think."
"Well, that figures!" O'Reilly snorted.
"And just what exactly does that mean?" Fonzarelli asked, still in that mild tone of voice.
"You know," O'Reilly replied, waving one hand in the air between them and—Fonzarelli noticed—careful to keep her volume down.
"No, I don't," the engineer disagreed.
O'Reilly looked at him, eyes narrow, then smiled and shrugged.