Chain of Command

by Frank Chadwick

  Sam laughed. “Yeah, I’m fine, Chief. Last time I did this was in one gee, that’s all.”

  He braced himself, one foot against the deck, one on a support arm, and went back to work.

  “Try it now.” Sam heard the fabricator, centimeters from his face, hum with power, followed by Montoya’s bark of satisfaction.

  “That’s got it, sir! Green lights on the board.”

  Sam pushed himself out from under the fabricator and turned to the machinist mate standing by.

  “DeWilde, isn’t it?” Sam asked. “I’m sure you guys follow all the preventive maintenance schedules, but the bottom injectors on these large-cap DP fabricators are always getting clogged up, especially if you get an in-job stoppage. If you trip a breaker or something, you get blowback in those bottom nozzles. So after you correct the main problem, always take a look underneath for trouble.”

  “Okay, sir,” DeWilde answered, looking surprised.

  “Thought you were a Tac officer, sir,” Pete Montoya said, the same questioning look on his face. “You do a hitch as a snipe?”

  “Nope. Back in The World I used to install and maintain these pigs,” Sam said, gesturing to the large fabricator. “So tell your boss, Lieutenant Hennessey, she’s got her number three fabricator turning out high-temp pipe again. I need that dorsal radiator back on line by 2400 hours.”

  The fusion reactor generated enormous energy—one and a half gigawatts at full power—but also enormous waste heat. Some of that was released with the thruster’s reaction mass, some was converted to electricity by the Seebeck generator, but the excess waste heat was bled off by the boat’s four large radiators, extending radially from the stern of the boat. Each radiator not in service cut the maximum safe power output of their reactor by a quarter.

  “Aye, aye, sir. And thanks for the help.” Montoya gave him a crooked grin as he took the nitrogen blower.

  The tone for his embedded commlink sounded and he saw the tag for the duty commtech. He dismissed Montoya with a wave.

  “Captain here.”

  Chief Gambara, sir. I’ve got a request from the flagship for a holocon with you.

  “How soon, Chief?”

  Right now, sir. I think it’s the chief of staff.

  “Okay, I’ve got my helmet. I’ll plug in and take it down here.”

  Sam lifted his helmet and felt a surge of apprehension. This was where he got chewed out for ignoring Captain Kleindienst’s direct order to cease fire during the battle, and maybe for his refusal to take Barger on board during the battle, and who knew what else? But the apprehension faded immediately, replaced by irritation at being pulled away from repairing his boat, and impatience to get back to it. He clicked the helmet in place and activated the holocon link.

  Instead of Marietta Kliendienst, he faced Admiral Kayumati himself, and his irritation vanished. The admiral looked more haggard than when he’d given his long rambling speech two days ago. He looked older. Had it really been just two days?

  “Bitka, you disobeyed a direct order,” the admiral’s holoimage said.

  “Yes, sir, I did.” Sam let out a short huff of breath and shrugged.” Truth is, Admiral, I imagine I’d do it again. I’ll turn over Puebla to Lieutenant Commander Barger as soon as he docks. Am I under arrest?”

  For a moment the admiral looked even more tired. “No, you’re not under arrest. We don’t usually throw captains in the brig for disobeying orders when it turns out they were right. Sometimes we do, but not usually. Besides, Lem Barger didn’t make it. He got it from an uBakai fire lance when his shuttle maneuvered between the missiles and Pensacola. Not sure whose idea it was, but I’m putting both him and the shuttle pilot in for Navy Crosses. Posthumously. Lots of posthumous medals today.

  “Where are you? Looks like engineering. How badly did you get hit?”

  “We were lucky, sir. Glancing hit, probably because we were realigning the boat for our shot. We have seven crew injured but none seriously. The hit took out about two hundred tons worth of hydrogen honeycomb tankage, but the internal bulkheads held and we didn’t get any O2 contamination. Our dorsal radiator’s almost a total loss, so our fusion power plant’s capped at about seventy percent if we need to go hot. But we’re fabricating high-temperature composite-alloy pipe to replace it and we should be back up to about ninety per cent by tomorrow. We lost another point defense laser, some sensor redundancy, and the boat’s axis is slightly bent.”

  “Bent?” Kayumati said. “Can you maneuver with your drives out of alignment?”

  “Not at the moment, sir, but we can magnetically bias the thrust angle a little and that’s all we’ll need. My Ops Boss is working on a software fix. We’re going to need some serious orbital spacedock time when we get home, but we’ve got atmosphere, power, and weapons, and we’ll be able to maneuver as soon as we get that software patch in place. Maybe three hours on that.”

  Larry Goldjiune had been surprisingly pliant and cooperative when Sam gave him the task of getting the drives realigned. Perhaps the pounding the uBakai had delivered to the task force had sobered him, or frightened him, or made him less anxious to take command responsibility for what was shaping up as a disaster.

  As Sam spoke he saw the ghostly shadows of officers and crew moving behind Admiral Kayumati, a constant flutter of movement. One officer briefly came into sharper focus to hand Kayumati a data pad. The admiral nodded and handed it back, then looked at Sam again.

  “Three hours is better than I expected. How many missiles you get off?”

  “Nine, sir,” Sam answered. “Six over the north horizon of K’tok, the others south as they were departing. After that we didn’t have an intercept solution any more. They were just moving too fast.”

  “Any hits?” the admiral asked.

  Sam’s mind returned to the final frantic minutes of the engagement, when all their missiles were away and the bridge crew waited for some indication of success—Filipenko hugging herself, arms crossing, as if keep herself from flying apart with nervous energy, Ron Ramirez’s face tear-stained although he seemed unaware of it, Elise Delacroix calling off range to target in her nasal Quebecois accent.

  “Their point defense took out at least half our missiles,” he told the admiral, “and once the rest started detonating we couldn’t see much past the plasma cloud, so I can’t be sure, but . . . I don’t think so. No sign of heat spikes from any of the bandits, no visible debris.”

  Admiral Kayumati nodded. “Good honest answer, son. No, I don’t think you touched them—same as the other destroyers. The cruisers got a hit or two, and we took out at least one enemy ship. I say at least one because we blew it into so many pieces we couldn’t tell if all that junk was parts from one ship or two. But I think something’s seriously wrong with those fancy new Block Four missiles you destroyer folks are carrying. You may as well have been shooting blanks.”

  Sam tasted something bad in his mouth, felt different feelings tugging at him. At least it wasn’t just our shooting that was bad. It wasn’t something we’d screwed up. But the price for that absolution had been universal failure, and a problem that might be much harder to solve. He’d far rather have had two or three more dead uBakai warships, and let someone else get the credit.

  “How bad were the casualties on the cruisers, sir? Some of the crew . . . they have friends over there, former shipmates.”

  Kayumati looked at him for a moment, eyes empty. “We’re still searching, but as near as we can tell casualties on the three cruisers, the two fleet auxiliaries, and the one transport which were lost were one hundred percent. We lost two destroyers as well, but we got an emergency signal from survivors in Vicksburg and we have a shuttle on the way to check Shiloh for survivors.”

  “One hundred per cent? But . . . how is that possible? Somebody usually survives, in an airtight compartment or in escape capsules . . . don’t they?”

  The admiral looked away for a moment and then back. Just moving his head looked as if it took most o
f his remaining energy.

  “From a fire lance hit, yes. But they used some sort of electronic warfare on us, a version we’ve never encountered before, never even dreamed of. Atwater-Jones is still going over the signal intercept data. We’ll put together a briefing as soon as she and her staff figure out more pieces of the puzzle, but the bottom line is this: somehow they caused six of our ships to engage their interstellar jump drives. The electronic jump signature is clear as a bell, but mostly they didn’t go anywhere.” He paused and sighed, then shook his head.

  “This deep in a gravity well, the jump impulse was what the engineering people call ‘noncoherent’. Pieces of the ship and crew—very small pieces—jumped, but apparently only a few millimeters, and caused a whole bunch of annihilation events. Not much left but wreckage and . . . well, human remains. I don’t know how they did it, but somehow the leatherheads can turn our own star drives into weapons against us.”

  For a moment Sam’s mind was occupied trying to stave off the imagined picture of Captain Aretha Chelanga and others on the bridge of Bully with pieces of them missing. No, he realized, they would mostly have exploded. He pushed the vision out of his mind, made himself think about the problem at hand.

  “But weren’t the jump drives powered down, sir?”

  “Yup. Didn’t matter. Like I said, we can’t figure out how it’s even possible to do what they did, and until we do, we don’t know how to protect our remaining ships from it.”

  A shiver of fear made Sam lift his shoulders, and then he realized something important, something that affected him and the Puebla directly.

  “Admiral, then that means—”

  “That’s right, Bitka,” the admiral said, cutting him off. “The only combatant vessels we have that we can count on to stand up against this weapon are ones without jump drives, which means your destroyers—and for the moment we only have three left in K’tok orbit. And there’s something wrong with your blasted missiles. I hope we can figure that out and fix it quick.” He shook his head again, looking down, but then looked up at Sam and straightened.

  “Captain Bitka, you are chopped to DesDiv Four effective immediately. I just field bumped Juanita Rivera on Champion Hill up to O-5 to take over what’s left of the division. She’s your new boss and she’ll brief you—as soon as we figure out what the heck our next move is and tell her. You got any questions, son?”

  “Just one, sir. Any idea when you’ll have another replacement captain to us?”

  Kayumati squinted at him, a flicker of irritation flashing across his face.

  “I’m a little short of officers myself at the moment, Bitka. You didn’t completely foul things up this morning so you’re going to have to run Puebla until we get some reinforcements or . . . well, something turns up. I’ll see about taking Commander Huhn off your hands, but no promises. For the next thirty or so hours all our orbital transfer assets are going to be busier than a long-tailed cat at a rocking chair convention.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  24 December 2133

  (thirty minutes later) (third day in K’tok orbit)

  The wardroom was crowded, holding all the off-duty officers in white as well as the khaki-clad senior chiefs, almost a dozen total. Sam paused at the open hatch. He’d had the mess attendants set the wardroom’s smart walls to mimic the HRVS optics pointed laterally, so K’tok—enormous, blue, and cloud-wrapped—dominated the view to port. They were just coming up on the needle, a shining golden thread impossibly long, stretching all the way down into K’Tok’s atmosphere and over forty thousand kilometers up to its orbiting counterweight. Somewhere down at the bottom of it, Human troops held a small bridgehead on the planetary surface, and were counting on support from a task force that had just been shot to pieces.

  But that wasn’t his immediate problem.

  Realistically, he figured he had one chance to win Puebla’s officers and chiefs over. He knew he’d have plenty of chances to lose them later, but that wouldn’t make any difference if he couldn’t even make this first meeting click.

  No pressure.

  “Atten-shun!” one of the chiefs barked and the officers and chiefs snapped to smartly enough, although several of them weren’t tethered and so started drifting slowly across the compartment.

  Sam took in a slow breath.

  Okay. It’s a staff meeting. You’ve run these before. Maybe not in space, not in the middle of a war, but the principle’s the same: don’t let them see you sweat.

  “As you were,” Sam said. “I’m having this meeting piped to the crew so we’re all on the same page. I just talked to Admiral Kayumati half an hour ago. We’ll get a complete report later, but what it boils down to is we got our asses kicked. We were very lucky on Puebla to come away with just a few bruises. Eight vessels are total writeoffs, including three cruisers and two destroyers, and most of their crews are dead.”

  They had suspected bad news but he could see from their faces this was worse than expected.

  “We probably all lost friends today. I had friends on Bully Big Dick. Captain Chelanga . . . well, she was a hell of a lady. When you’re back in your cabins, take a moment, remember them, but right now we’ve got too much work to do.

  “I wish like hell I could tell you Puebla got a piece of those bastards, but we didn’t. It wasn’t your fault. You got our missiles out the tube faster than any other unit in the task force, except Bully, and near as I can tell we had the best target solutions. The problem is our damned missiles are broken. None of the destroyers got any hits, so it looks like the problem is in the Block Four missile design.”

  Sam scanned the group and was pleased—and a little surprised—to see Marina Filipenko and Joe Burns, his Tac Boss and Bull Tac, floating side-by-side.

  “Lieutenant Filipenko, Chief Burns, that’s the tactical department’s big job. Figure out what’s wrong with the missiles and fix it. Get Chief Menzies in on this, too. Nobody knows those Block Fours better than she does. Contact the other destroyers and get together with their tac-heads. Tight beam Hornet and see what their squints have to say. We’ve got a machine shop and fabricators, so you should be able to jury-rig something. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to the operations staff next but found Gordy Cunningham, the Bull Ops, floating next to Constancia Navarro and Chief Pete Montoya from engineering, with Ensign Barb Lee on the other side of the wardroom.

  “Ensign Lee, Chief Cunningham, I’ve got two jobs for the operations department. First, figure out a way to get a quick and dirty map of the asteroid belt so we can detect ships by stellar occlusion, even with asteroids behind them. This time they hit us from above, but those uBakai shitheads like to play hide-and-seek with the asteroids, and I’m sick of it.”

  “Sir, I don’t know how we can manage that,” Lee said.

  Lee had been calm and confident under fire only two hours earlier. She had been the same, he remembered, during the first attack three weeks ago. It was odd seeing her hesitant and unsure of herself in a meeting. Maybe her brain needed a good shot of adrenaline to get going, or maybe she’d settle down once she got away from the crowd and back to a workstation.

  “Genius, Ensign Lee. Give me an act of genius.

  “Now here’s operations department’s number two job. Lieutenant Goldjune will take this one when he’s done with the software patch he’s working on, but you pass it on to him. We lost six ships today that the uBakai never touched with a fire lance missile. They made their jump drives cycle and it killed the ships and everyone in them. Nobody knows how they did it.

  “Get with Task Force intel, pore over their data, our data, ship specs, whatever we have. How come those six ships blew up and the other eight jump-equipped ships in the task force didn’t? Start there. If we don’t figure out a way to keep our cruisers from blowing up, there’s going to be nobody left to hold the fort but us and two other destroyers. Anybody here think that sounds like a good plan?”

  He looked aroun
d and got a lot of shaking heads and a smattering of no’s.

  “Okay.

  “Lieutenant Hennessey, Chief Montoya, engineering’s only job is to get us operational, and as quickly as possible. Any off-watch personnel from any other department with usable skills, you take ‘em. Lieutenant Goldjune’s finishing the software patch to bias the thrust nozzles, and I just told Admiral Kayumati we’d be ready to maneuver in three hours.”

  “Three hours?” Hennessey repeated. “How long before Goldjune’s done with the software patch?”

  “No idea, but it was advertised as ‘soon.’ Don’t look at me like that, Lieutenant. I’d give you an easy job if I had one, but there just aren’t any today.

  “And Lieutenant Rice, our supply officer. The task force lost one transport and two fleet auxiliaries today, almost half our support vessels. That’s going to mean trouble supplying the troops on the ground. Find out how bad the situation is and what they may need. It’s not our job yet, but it might end up that way, so if it does, let’s get out ahead of it mentally.”

  “I’m on it,” Moe answered.

  Sam scanned the faces. The men and women in front of him didn’t look happy or cheerful, but they didn’t look in shock either. Their minds were engaged, every department had a job to do, and for now that was as good as he could manage.

  “Questions?”

  “Yes, sir, I got one,” Gordy Cunningham, the Bull Ops said. “What the hell collided with us during the battle? Was that Pensacola’s shuttle?”

  “We took a hit from an uBakai fire lance missile, Chief,” Sam answered.

  “You mean it ran right into us? I thought they just shot a laser.”

  “That’s right, it shot a laser and the laser hit us.”

  Cunningham shook his head. “No, a laser would’ve cut through, right? This felt like something big slammed right into us.”

  Sam heard a mutter of agreement from the others, all except Chief Burns who looked at the others as if they were crazy. Joe Burns had been the chief of the weapons division before he moved up to Bull Tac, so he knew fire lance missiles and what they did. Didn’t everyone? No, apparently not.