“Yes, good question, Bitka. Commander?”
When Cassandra unfroze she shrugged elegantly, with both her shoulders and eyebrows. “I am certain there is an answer for that, but I have no idea what it is. We have intelligence-gathering assets on Hazz’Akatu, but I imagine they have just begun exploring the issue. How long before—or even if—they will have an answer, and how long before it reaches us, is unknowable.
“In the mean time, we do know the uBakai have been reinforced and you should expect to see even more of them before help arrives for you. I am very sorry I can’t be more encouraging.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
4 January 2134
(the next day) (fourteenth day in K’tok orbit)
Good morning, Bitka, Commodore Bonaventure greeted him by tight beam commlink. I hope to God you have better news this morning than the Red Duchess did yesterday.
“Well, if you count a brilliant idea coming from a hygenist’s mate third class as good news, then yes I do.”
Your boat’s barber? Okay, what’s his great idea?
“Her great idea, sir, and I think she prefers the term stylist. Since the orbital bombardment took out those uBakai gunsleds there’s a good chance they’ll try to land some more, or at least land something new to keep the ground fight going. Her idea is to put a bunch of Block Four missiles just above low orbit and in low-energy mode. They’ll look like normal satellite junk on a quick scan and that’s all the uBakai will have time for. This way no matter where they come from we’ve got a good chance of having a missile or two within firing range, and they won’t be ready for them.”
Didn’t Mike Wu on Petersburg recommend something like that? But the problem is our Block Fours can’t maneuver once we dump them out there.
“That’s right, sir, and that makes it a bad investment in a general action that could be forty thousand klicks or more out. But here we’re talking about an attack profile that requires them to come in close in order to drop their cargo into the atmosphere. They have to come to the missiles.”
Well . . . that might work, but where are we going to find those extra missiles? I don’t want to strip our magazines.
“She’s got that covered, too, sir: Champion Hill. The explosion and damage was all forward. The missile rooms aft should still be intact.”
Champion Hill? You know, that’s a very good idea. How does your stylist know about missiles?
“She reads Navy Times, sir. I guess there was a big article about deep space missiles a couple months back. We’re still pretty close to the wreck. You want me to get an EVA party ready and shift orbit?”
No. It’s a good idea and I’m going to cut your stylist a commendation, but Puebla still has the bombardment saddle pack so you stay put. I’ll put out a call in the task group for salvage volunteers. We have a lot of survivors from the Hill. They might want to be part of this. Give her a “well done” from me, Bitka.
Sam turned the bridge over to Barb Lee and headed back toward officer country but decided it was time he looked in on engineering to see how the radiator patches were holding up. On his way he stuck his head through the hatch of the port-side missile room. Chief Joyce Menzies and another petty officer were at work on a dismantled Block Four missile, and Sam pulled himself through the hatch to glide over to them.
“How’s it going, Chief?” he asked.
She looked up and smiled.
“I think we got this bâtard sorted out, sir,” she said and gestured toward the missile housing.
“Good. I want some fangs to redden when the time comes. How soon will they be ready?”
“This one’ll be good to go in an hour and we already have nine others finished. Problem is we have to do all the fine interior work by hand with microdrills, one laser pointer at a time. Takes fuckin ‘forever—beggin’ your pardon, sir. But the leatherheads are going to howl when we fire these. That is the de crisse truth.”
“I believe you, Chief. Next time I shoot at an uBakai cruiser, I want to at least see it spilling atmosphere.”
She looked down at the gutted missile for a moment.
“We can do better than that, sir.”
She looked up and Sam expected to see a smile, but instead faced intense concentration, almost obsession.
“Captain Wu—you know, from USS Petersburg, an old tac head like you. Anyway, we get talking, we work out a variant on the multiple-targeting option. We call it tournesol—sunflower. How would you like, you shoot one missile with the sunflower program loaded, you take out fifteen incoming enemy missiles?”
Fifteen? Sam thought about that. Most threat situations didn’t have to deal with more than a half dozen incoming missiles at a time. Taking out fifteen at once . . .
“If you can really do that, Menzies, it changes the game. I’ll have to think about it, but I mean that: it changes the whole game. Well done, Chief.”
Menzies actually blushed. She picked up a torque wrench from its magnetic gripper, moved it from one hand to another, then put it back in the holder.
At least they could still turn out technicians like Menzies: just a chief petty officer, bumped up from ace machinist mate, but she wasn’t a robot going through the motions by rote. She understood what she was doing, understood the underlying logic of the device, and knew how to tweak it, make it work better than its designers had imagined.
“I don’t know if you’ve thought about what you’re going to do after the war, Menzies, whether you’re going to stay in the service or move to the private sector, but either way you should go back to school. Navy will pay for it and you’ve good a good brain in that skull.”
She smiled and blushed again.
“Oh, I go to school, sure-sure. I was already accepted and everything, but. . . ” she paused and shrugged, then held up her hand and rubbed her thumb against her first two fingers. “Pas d’argent. But like you say, Navy will pay now, especially since I made chief.”
“Where were you accepted?”
She looked embarrassed.
“Julliard, the ensemble music department. They like my compositions and the arrangements I do for my band . . . I mean, I love this stuff,” she said, resting her hand on the missile casing, “but ‘Lise and I want a family, and who hires a missile monkey?” She again held up her hand and rubbed her thumb and fingers together. “Pas d’argent.”
No money. Sam remembered Kayumati’s speech, his rambling complaint about Humans not training enough engineers and scientists. Maybe he had a point. The Varoki had a lock on all the science research, so the real money was in entertainment. Hard to compete with that.
Several hours later the chime on Sam’s cabin door sounded and when he turned it transparent he was surprised to see Larry Goldjune floating outside.
“Good afternoon, sir,” Goldjune said as soon as Sam released the hatch. “Do you have a minute?”
Sam motioned him in and toward his workstation/desk.
“Come in, Mr. Goldjune, I was just drafting a lessons learned report. Hard to know where to start.”
Sam clipped himself to the padded frame behind the desk. “What can I do for you?”
Goldjune hooked his feet through a deck stanchion. “That was a good talk after the admiral’s speech,” he said. “Short and to the point. I think it will help the crew, too. Did you know Chief Navarro has taken your speech from the wardroom holorecord and is having the crew view it in shifts, by watch?”
Sam shifted uncomfortably. He hadn’t known that and he’d expected the chiefs to pass the word themselves. He wasn’t sure it was that good a speech.
“Didn’t know that. I guess Navarro is exercising her initiative.”
“Yes, sir. You mentioned we need to use our heads, come up with all the ideas we can. The reason I came is I think I’ve figured out the solution to that mapping problem you gave Ensign Lee. Well, not a solution so much as a way around it.”
Sam leaned forward, suddenly alert. “A way around it? What do you mean?”
&nbs
p; “Well, I had her working on a classic solution. I got the idea from radio astronomy—it’s called very long baseline interferometry. They use widely separated radio telescope discs looking at the same object to construct a virtual massive array. I thought, why can’t we do something like that to link the observational data from all the ships we’ve got scattered through the system? If we have their timestamps, we can collate everything and get multiangle views of the asteroid belt and what they’re occluding.”
That sounded like a reasonable idea to Sam, but he noticed Goldjune had used the past tense. “You came up with something different?”
“Yes, sir. The asteroids only clutter our detection-by-occlusion because we’re in the plane of the ecliptic with them. We need to send a sensor drone up, above the plane, and look down on it. That way there’s no clutter—well, hardly any—to fox the sensors.”
Sam felt the hair on his neck stand up, his scalp tingle, and his face flush, but with excitement rather than embarrassment. “God, am I stupid! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Not stupid, sir. You’re just not an astrogator.”
“Well, maybe there’s something to this whole astrogation business after all.” Sam squinted up the watch codes and pinged the duty comm technician.
This is Chief Gambara. What can I do for you, Captain?
“Chief, get me an audio tight beam to the pennant. I need to talk to the commodore.”
Aye aye, sir.
“While we’re waiting, you want something to drink?” Sam asked.
“I wouldn’t say no to a swallow of that bourbon you served the other night,” Goldjune answered and smiled—the first time Sam could remember him doing so.
Sam smiled as well and pointed to the wall cabinet. “Pour me a short one, too. This calls for a celebration.”
As Sam took the drinking bulb Goldjune handed to him, his commlink vibrated and came alive.
Que pedo? Commodore Bonaventure grumbled. This better be real good, Bitka. My supper’s getting cold.
“Oh, it’s real good, sir. Lieutenant Goldjune, my XO, has figured out how to see past the asteroid clutter. We’re going to find out where those bastards are hiding.”
Once his conversation with Commodore Bonaventure and his drink with Larry Goldjune were finished, and he was alone, he sat quietly for several minutes. Then he took a deep breath and pinged Chief Gambara in the communications chair again.
Yes, sir?
“Chief, see if you can get a tight beam voice link to the task force N-2, on USS Pensacola.”
Aye aye, sir.
Was he imagining things or did he hear a bit of a smirk in Gambara’s voice? If she thought there was something hot and heavy going on between him and Cassandra Atwater-Jones, it just meant she hadn’t been listening in on their conversations.
It took a few minutes to set up the tight beam, and before Gambara patched him in she let him know the round-trip time lag was now about two minutes.
“Commander, this is Captain Bitka on USS Puebla. You told me to tight beam you if I had anything of interest for task force intelligence,” he began. He outlined the drone idea, being careful to credit it to a subordinate officer, and then went on.
“I alerted Commodore Bonaventure already and he is having USS Petersburg launch a sensor drone this evening. Because of the limitations on coil gun payloads, our drones don’t have the range and versatility of the drones some of the cruisers carry, so you may want to augment our efforts. Over.”
It wasn’t standard procedure to use the “over” tag on routine ship-to-ship audio communications, but with time delays this long it helped to let folks know when you were done talking. He sipped water as he waited for the reply. He saw his hand tremble slightly. He wasn’t sure where he stood with Atwater-Jones after the business for the cheat code, but he was surprised it seemed to matter to him this much.
Good afternoon, Captain Bitka. Would you please wait a moment? I have to check on something.
Again her voice sounded professional and courteous, but without that impression of a half-suppressed smile he’d grown used to. The time stretched out to over ten minutes and he was beginning to think she had forgotten when her voice returned.
Well, let me start by saying this is an excellent insight, so much so I could not imagine why no one else had thought of it. I expected to discover there was some complicated astrogation reason it would not work. Instead I encountered a very tangled tale. You might want to get comfortable, as this is somewhat long and involved.
Asteroid clutter is not normally a problem because our astrogators have complete data maps of the asteroids in the systems where we operate. We have made maps of our home system and Bronstein’s World. Other races or agencies have compiled data maps of most other explored systems. When Human ships have served as part of a combined Cottohazz peacekeeping force, they have had access to its military-grade data sets, but only while serving on Cottohazz duty. They surrender them upon returning to national service.
Human colonists only began arriving at K’tok within the last thirty months. It took some time to recognize that, in the event of war, we would not have access to the same Cottohazz data maps as before and would need to compile our own. Then it took time to decide who would do it, who would pay for it, and who would have access to the data once it was compiled.
In the end, the United Nations Joint Astrographic Consortium—UNJAC—undertook the survey and we—that is to say the Western European Union—loaned the German survey ship FGS Windischgrätz to UNJAC for that purpose. Windischgrätz arrived here about five months ago and began its survey, and five months was the estimated completion time of the project.
It seems our astrogators and electronic warfare types have simply been waiting for UNJAC to make the new data set available, which should be any time now, right? The problem is Windischgrätz has gone missing. No one here noticed that until I began asking these awkward questions. Why didn’t they notice? Windischgrätz was not subordinated to the task force; it reported directly and exclusively to UNJAC back on Earth.
She paused and Sam imagined her shaking her head and probably shrugging with her eyebrows.
You know, for a number of years we all lectured wisely and quite persuasively about how very hard it would be to break free of peacetime patterns of thought should war—this sort of war—ever come. Yet here we are, repeatedly surprised when we do in fact find ourselves letting go too late of one peacetime habit or another. Then we are surprised that we are surprised.
Well. This is an excellent idea, and long overdue. Please extend my congratulations to your subordinate. I will see to launching a proper remote sensor platform before the next watch is out. Over.
That was it, then, wasn’t it? This wasn’t a personal call, just fleet business, but there was one more item under that heading.
“Commander, two days ago you said better minds than ours were hard at work figuring out how to deal with those uBakai reinforcements we spotted. A lot’s happened since then but the thing is, it has been two days and although we got a nice briefing about the enemy and all, I think Commodore Bonaventure is sort of waiting for some more definite orders. The two cruisers from Mogo just did their fly-by today and slingshot back out to follow you folks. After the loss of USS Champion Hill we’re down to four boats. I know DesDiv Five is coming to join us late tomorrow, and that’ll double our strength. But Admiral Goldjune said something about the best defense being a good offense. Is somebody thinking about how to reach out and smack those guys instead of just sitting here waiting for the axe to fall? Over.”
Sam sipped his water, and pretended it was a rum and fruit drink with a little umbrella on top, as he watched the wind rustle the leaves of the palm tree on the small island just a few meters beyond the other side of his cabin wall. He should find out where this holo-image had been recorded, go there someday when he got back to Earth, maybe lie down and hug the sand, and thank it for keeping him sane in the middle of all this madness.
> Captain Bitka, please tell Commodore Bonaventure I will try to get some sort of coherent command decision articulated concerning your force. Rather, I will continue to do so. You should know that certain members of the task force staff are sick to death of hearing me harp on this subject—so sick the very mention of it angers them. Fortunately, I rather enjoy angering them, so that’s not as much of a disincentive for pressing the case as they might imagine.
But do not expect much from here. As far as your task group is concerned, the current plan, if you care to dignify it as such, is: ‘Do whatever you can, as long as you can, and God bless you.’
If it were up to me, and if the decision was made to pull the main fleet elements back, I would have evacuated the ground troops up the needle, loaded them on the transports, and left with the entire marching band. Failing that, I would have left the transports in orbit so evacuation remained at least an option. Or I would have left USS Queretaro to strengthen the destroyers. Why we are all in train to Mogo is beyond me. Originally it was to deny the uBakai access to scoop refueling there, but that seems rather a low-priority at the moment. But what do I know? I am merely an intelligence officer.
Sam listened to several seconds of silence and started to think Atwater-Jones was done and had forgotten to say “over,” but then he heard her draw a deep, shuddering breath and go on.
Sorry for the rant, she said quietly, but it is disgraceful. It is utterly disgraceful, and I am ashamed to be any part of it. Tell Commodore Bonaventure to look to his own resources. Make whatever plans you can. The uBakai have been reinforced and they can be expected to attack at any time. The task force will do nothing to help you. Nothing.
Chain of Command Page 24