Chain of Command

by Frank Chadwick

So, as long as there was going to be a war anyway—and there clearly was—be sure to run these experiments we’ve been curious about, and don’t worry about losses. We’d like to see what happens when a destroyer breaks. For a moment Sam thought he was going to be sick.

  The distribution list—division commanders and above—pretty much limited the culprit to someone on Commodore Bonaventur’s Oaxaca or Captain Rockaway’s Vimy Ridge, the only two surviving division lead boats. Bonaventure had already told him at the holoconference that, once the orders became public, as task group smart boss he would be tagged to “ferret out the leak.” He had already sketched out in his own mind the detailed investigation and collection of data records he would assemble for his report. They would leave no data file concerning the orders or any use of communication equipment in either Oaxaca or Vimy Ridge unexamined or uncopied. They would also turn up no evidence of either copying or leaking the orders because, Sam already knew, there was no evidence to discover.

  Readers of the sealed orders would also find the signature interesting: Admiral Cedrick J. Goldjune, Commander, US 11th Fleet—the same Admiral Goldjune who was now CNO for the Outworld Coalition, the same one who had looked the task force in the eye four days ago and said it was never his intention to send them in harm’s way. Utter bullshit.

  Sam also remembered that the head of BuShips—who had directed Kayumati to use the destroyers “aggressively” and to consider them expendable—was Larry’s father, and both the father and the uncle knew Larry was serving on a destroyer when these orders were drafted.

  What did that say about Goldjune’s family? Perhaps that they subordinated family ties to duty, but everything he’d ever heard about their family influence, and willingness to use it, made that hard to credit. It seemed more likely they were willing to subordinated family loyalty to personal ambition.

  Or maybe they just didn’t like Larry, or didn’t think he would measure up. Maybe they had another golden boy waiting in the wings, a better heir apparent. Maybe that’s what Larry was so afraid of.

  Vice-Captain Takaar Nuvaash, Speaker for the Enemy, found Admiral e-Lapeela in the cruiser’s tactical command center, in the main hull section where there was no spin-induced gravity. He steadied himself by a handhold and waited for the admiral to finish his conversation with the cruiser’s captain. When the captain pushed away, e-Lapeela turned to Nuvaash and gestured for him to speak.

  “I bear new intelligence on the enemy. For reasons uncertain, a member of the enemy fleet broadcast a copy of the enemy admiral’s sealed orders from his high command.”

  “Probably forgeries intended to mislead us,” e-Lapeela said.

  Nuvaash cocked his head to one side.

  “I am less certain of that than is the admiral. There is really nothing of immediate tactical use, nothing which, were we to believe it, might lead us into a misstep.”

  e-Lapeela shifted impatiently. “Then why is this worth my time?”

  “It suggests some level of disaffection among the enemy, or the document would not have been shared. The political department is ecstatic. If authentic, and I believe it to be so, it appears to prove the Earth fleet came here with the intention of beginning a war.”

  “Ha!” e-Lapeela exclaimed. “We were right all along.”

  “It seems so, Admiral. How sad that Governor e-Rauhaan did not survive. Even he would have been an enthusiastic supporter of war with the Humans once they provoked the conflict.”

  e-Lapeela’s eyes narrowed and his ears folded back against his head.

  “Tread carefully, Speaker.”

  Nuvaash bowed.

  “I live to obey.”

  e-Lappla grunted. “I wonder sometimes. But there is nothing wrong with your brain, I cannot deny that. So let it work for you now. Were you the Humans, where would you most fear an attack? Speak for the enemy.”

  Nuvaash paused, not considering the question so much as his answer to it. He had already thought through that very issue, knew exactly what conclusion he had reached, but he hesitated. This war created by e-Lapeela’s ambition, or perhaps his political fanaticism, or his nearly psychotic fear of Humans, was criminal. But regardless of its genesis, the nation was now at war. Was Nuvaash’s obligation to wage that war as successfully as possible or to try to derail it? Although his countrymen might not be well-served by this war, would they be any better served by a defeat? And was that his decision to make? His feelings for e-Lapeela were, he found, a mix of grudging respect and mounting repulsion, but what did his feelings for the admiral really matter? He could not bring disaster on all the blameless others in this fleet just to humble the one monster, particularly a monster who might be right about the Humans.

  “Admiral, I cannot look into the soul of the one unique individual guiding their decisions, but I can tell you what my two greatest fears would be.

  “The results of the last raid on K’tok clearly show that the enemy destroyers have overcome the problem with their missiles. Nevertheless, K’tok remains the key to this part of our campaign. If we sweep the remaining destroyers away, we win the campaign in a single day. The Human ground forces will be forced to surrender once their bombardment support and all possibility of additional supplies and reinforcements getting to them are cut off. “

  “Yes, that would do nicely,” e-Lapeela said, sitting back in his chair and smiling.. “Imagine how the Humans will respond to that humiliation!”

  “Yes, Admiral, provided we can best them given the limited number of ships currently at our command. But the force in transit to Mogo is the weakest in combat power and has the most valuable assets—the support echelon for the enemy fleet, as well as its commander and staff. If we destroy the force entirely, the remaining Human elements will be widely separated and without a unified command.”

  e-Lapeela looked away for a moment and shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Nuvaash, your choice torments me. I wonder, do you mean it to?”

  Two hours later all of Puebla’s off-watch commissioned officers were assembled in the wardroom and all had read the sealed orders for the task force. They, along with three of the four senior chiefs, now shifted uncomfortably, casting furtive glances toward Sam who had tethered himself to the main mess table in the center of the room.

  “Three things,” he said, “one about home, one about the enemy, one about those leaked orders. Home first.

  “The strike against Earth was bad, but it mostly hit military targets. Our orbital repair facilities are wrecked and they broke the Quito Needle.”

  He saw an uneasy stir run through the men and women.

  “Civilian casualties were in the thousands, repeat, thousands. Not millions. I don’t take that as good news, but it could have been a lot worse. But if they’re going after Earth, it means they’re after Humans, all Humans, and just because we are Humans. I want you to think about that.

  “Second, the enemy.

  “We’ve been interrogating the Varoki prisoners from the last fight, and we’ve gotten some intelligence about what’s going on back on the Varoki home world. This is big, bigger than we thought. It’s still just the uBakai formally at war with us, along with some renegade ships from two other Varoki navies, but a lot of Varoki countries are on the fence and ready to fall either way. If we pull back from K’tok, or let the uBakai take it from us, it’ll signal all those fence-sitters that we’re easy to push around and it’s safe for them to join the war. In other words, if we back down or buckle here, the war gets bigger, not smaller. The next strike against Earth will be a lot worse. Not one step back, understood?

  “The folks who put us here didn’t know that’s the situation we’d find ourselves in. They probably should have, it was their job to, but they didn’t and here we are. Feeling bad about it isn’t going to change anything. All we can do is deal with it. Our people are trying to get us some reinforcements, but until they do it’s up to us to hold K’tok with what we’ve got here right now.”

  He look
ed around and saw grudging agreement. He didn’t blame them for their reluctance. They’d have to be stupid or crazy to like the situation they were in. They needed to accept it, though, and the necessity for what they were doing. They needed to focus on the how, not the why. But the why wasn’t just going to go away on its own.

  “Okay, third thing. Has everyone read through the sealed orders, which apparently some idiot on Cha-Cha or Vimy Ridge leaked?”

  Sam saw some nods and awkward looks. Senior Chief Pete Montoya, floating next to Rose Hennessey, his department boss, spat out, “Yes, sir,” in an angry voice. Pete had a talent for anger. Well, anger wasn’t necessarily a liability, provided it was pointed in the right direction.

  “Good,” Sam said. “So now you know what one admiral really thinks. I don’t know how you felt, but reading it wasn’t the proudest day of my career, especially thinking back to what that admiral said a few days earlier about why he sent us here and why we’re fighting this war.

  “Maybe sometimes they forget this, but admirals aren’t the whole Navy. They’re our bosses and when they give us an order we follow it. They get to do that. That’s how the chain of command works. What they don’t get to do is tell us why each one of us is fighting a war, especially when they aren’t even here fighting it with us.”

  That got a reaction. Some of the younger officers grinned after their look of surprise disappeared. Rose Hennessey and Moe Rice exchanged a worried look. Sam knew this was dangerous ground, but he didn’t care. The danger all around them, the nightmare they were headed into, made pissing off an admiral or two seem pretty tame by comparison.

  “I don’t get to do that either—tell you why you’re fighting, I mean—even though I’m right here with you. All I can do is tell you why I’m fighting.

  “I’m fighting for my life, because there’s a bunch of Varoki who want to kill me and every other Human they can, just because we’re human. What is it about being Human that would do that? What does it even mean to be Human? What do we have in common that makes us who we are?

  He paused and held up his open hand for them to see. “Look at this. No claws, just these weak little fingernails that come off and hurt like hell if you scratch something too hard.”

  He opened his mouth wide and showed his teeth. “No fangs, either. We’re not fast enough to catch anything small enough to kill and eat, and also not fast enough to get away from most animals big enough to kill and eat us. We are piss-poor predators and not even very good survivors—on our own.

  “What have we got?” He patted his forehead with his palm. “We got this, a brain, and you know what this great big Human brain we’ve got mostly does? It figures out how to communicate with other Humans.

  “That’s our edge—other Humans. You drop a naked Human in the middle of a jungle, he ends up something’s lunch. You drop twenty naked Humans in a jungle together, in a month or two they come out wearing animal skins, and a couple of them are probably pregnant.”

  That got some chuckles.

  “The way we survive—the way we’ve always survived—is together. This lone wolf everyone-for-themselves fantasy you hear sometimes—how that’s what we really are deep down inside—it’s all crap. We live in families, in clans, in tribes. We divide ourselves up dozens of ways, but always into tribes. The tribe of the tac-heads, tribe of the snipes, the officers, the chiefs, the acey-deucies.

  “One thing the Navy gets right is it puts the most important tribe front and center. The single most important unit in the US Navy, and probably every other Human navy, isn’t the individual mariner or the division or the department or the task force or the fleet. It is the crew of a single vessel. Everything revolves around that and builds on it. I didn’t always get that, but I do now.”

  He saw some nods following that.

  “So what am I fighting for? The most important thing for me now is this crew I’m part of. I’m fighting for us. But that’s not my only tribe. I have family back home—father, mother and younger brother—and I’m fighting for them.

  “The US of NA is a tribe we all share, too. As countries go, ours isn’t very old, just turned seventy last October 10th, but it’s got a lot of history going back further than that. It’s put together from three countries that got put together and almost taken apart themselves a few times. But we did get put together, and we’ve stuck so far. Some of our parents were born citizens of Mexico or Canada or the old USA. Most of our grandparents were, and can still remember those days, but for us that’s just history. Our national motto says it all: E Pluribus Unum. It’s Latin, means from many, one.

  “The names of our boats in DesRon Two are like a history of where we come from.

  Our division, DesDiv Three, had Oaxaca, Tacambaro, Queretaro, and Puebla. Those are the four decisive battles where Benito Juarez drove Maximilian and the Europeans out of Mexico permanently. I didn’t know that until a few days ago, had to look it up. Mexico came together as an independent nation at those four battles.

  “DesDiv Four had Vicksburg, Champion Hill, Petersburg, and Shiloh. They’re named for four battles in a war fought to decide the future of the USA—not just its physical boundaries, but its soul, who we are, what we value most.

  “DesDiv Five had Vimy Ridge, Amiens, Arleux, and Canal du Nord, four battles in World War I where Canadian soldiers went over the top for the first time as Canadians, instead of guys from a bunch of different provinces that happened to be next door to each other. E pluribus unum.

  “We have four Earth nations in the fight, but I think it’s about everyone back home. In a way, that’s our tribe, too: Humanity. And I think that’s where this fight is going, the Human race pulling together for a change, because—and make no mistake about this—we are deep in the jungle right now. But every instinct and racial memory we share trumpets to us how we get out of it: we get out together.”

  He saw a lot of nods now.

  “All of our family histories are road maps of where we’ve been, and I think of where we’re going. Who better to blaze this trail than the US Navy? E pluribus unum.”

  Sam paused and took a breath, knew he about to cross a line, but knew if he didn’t it would be an act of cowardice.

  “And I’ll tell you something else: what some admiral sitting in some office on Bronstein’s World says doesn’t change one damned bit of that.”

  He dismissed them and sent them off to the crew to spread his message of determination mixed with quiet contempt for Admiral Cedrick Goldjune.

  What he hadn’t told them was that, by withdrawing the transports from K’tok and moving them out toward Mogo, the gas giant, Admiral Kayumati had deliberately “pulled a Cortez,” as Atwater-Jones had described it to him yesterday.

  Hernán Cortés had burned his ships when his small army arrived in the New World, so that retreat was no longer an option, and victory was their only way home. Kayumati had as much as burned the ships of the Combined Expeditionary Brigade down on K’tok, or at least moved those ships to where it would now take a couple weeks to turn them around and bring them back. Admiral Goldjune had ordered the brigade withdrawn, but too late. Withdrawing the brigade was no longer an option. Two thousand men and women of the Combined Expeditionary Brigade were stuck on K’tok, with no immediate way to get them off-planet.

  Kayumati had made Admiral Goldjune and the Coalition hostage to those soldiers.

  The leak of Goldjune’s orders had probably sealed the deal. Sam hoped it had. No one’s career would survive the loss of a full expeditionary brigade, especially Goldjune’s since he’d dispatched the task force with such little apparent concern for its survival. That was now widely known. Only success could save him, and not a success which included two thousand ground troops in POW cages. Whatever forces the Coalition could scrape together wouldn’t be launched on some glorious but disastrous Doolittle-style raid on the Varoki home world; they would have to concentrate on saving the Combined Expeditionary Brigade.

  Sam knew there was no way
he could have made the decision Kayumati had. He couldn’t think of any other way Kayumati could have derailed Goldjune’s plan, but he wasn’t even sure it was Kayumati’s place to do that. Of course, it might not have been Sam’s and Bonaventure’s and Cassandra’s place to decide to leak the secret orders, but they had. That decision only put Admiral Goldjune on the spot, though. Kayumati’s decision put the lives of two thousand men and women on the line.

  Sam wasn’t sure it was the right decision—right as in moral and honorable. But Kayumati had done it. Talk about taking initiative and responsibility! And as a reward, Kayumati would be branded a coward, or at best an incompetent fool. Sam shook his head. The guy had a lot more guts than Sam had credited him with, and was a lot more ruthless than his grandfatherly image suggested.

  But none of that meant squat if the task group couldn’t maintain its hold on K’tok orbital space until help arrived from Earth. If the time came when there was no Combined Expeditionary Brigade left on K’tok to rescue, Sam was pretty sure Admiral Goldjune’s next order would be to avenge them. And then things would really go to hell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  9 January 2134

  (The next day) (nineteenth day in K’tok orbit)

  Nice speech, Bitka, Commodore Bonaventure told him early the next morning via tight beam commlink. They weren’t holoconferencing, but Sam spoke with his helmet on and sealed anyway for privacy as he sat in the bridge command chair.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  No, really. I mean, Admiral Godjune’s going to shit bricks, but I’m playing it for every crew in the task group. Now we just wait and see what fish that grenade brings to the surface of the pond.

  “Yes, sir. Just between you and me, what the hell was Admiral Goldjune thinking when he cut those orders?”

  No clue, Bitka. Maybe they vacuum your soul out your ear right before they pin those stars on your collar.

  Listen, this leak really is going to cause a shitstorm and I need to find out where it came from. Since my boat is one of the suspects, and since you’re acting smart boss, it’s your assignment. Find the leak and arrest whoever is responsible. Clear?