“What’s all this, then?” she said.
“Combined thank you and apology.”
She glanced up at him quickly and then opened the gift box and saw the bottle, slipped it part-way out and held it up in the light to admire.
“Oh, spendid! I know exactly what to do with this, but you didn’t owe me anything. Oh, you mean that letter to the admiral? I just told the truth.”
Sam shook his head.
“You found out HMS Furious had Kagataan drives.”
“Oh, rubbish. I confirmed the information about Furious, but you knew it was true as well as I did, and well before. And I am ashamed I did not think of the cheat code myself, especially after you’d made me so bloody angry about it.”
“Yeah,” Sam said, and felt himself color. “Sorry about that.”
She shook her head and held up the bottle of scotch. “Paid in full, Bitka.”
She took a step back and examined him with more care, squinting slightly in concentration.
“There’s something different about your uniform—more stripy, somehow.”
Sam laughed and held up his cuff. “Added a half-stripe between the two full ones. When it came time to decide what to do with me, Admiral Crutchley picked ‘all of the above.’ She gave me one letter of reprimand, two letters of commendation, and a field bump to lieutenant commander. It’ll have to be confirmed whenever I rotate back home—and I don’t have a lot of faith it will be—but until them I’m drawing O-4 pay.”
“Well, better call me Cassandra then, since we’re both commanders now, of a sort.”
They paused as a party of tall Varoki in uBakai naval uniforms was led past under Marine guard. Several of the uBakai officers turned and looked curiously at Sam and Cassandra, and one nodded. Cassandra nodded in return and gestured to Sam, as if introducing him. The uBakai officer’s ears spread wide in interest, but a Marine guard prodded him on his way with the business end of an assault rifle.
“Prisoners from the last battle,” Cassandra explained. “We rode down the needle together. Several of them spoke English, and that one was actually a fellow intelligence officer.”
“Bet that was an interesting conversation,” Sam said and Cassandra laughed.
“As a matter of fact, it was. He was quite impressed that I actually knew the chap who baited his admiral into turning away from K’tok and pursuing your destroyers. Now he’s gotten to see the officer in question.”
Still smiling, she stuffed the scotch in her musette bag, shouldered the strap, and began walking toward the exit. Sam fell in beside her.
“Where’s your luggage?” he said.
She held out the strap of her musette bag. “This is it, for the moment. Toiletries and a change of hospital-issue unmentionables. Everything else went with Pensacola. I don’t imagine the shopping prospects are very good down here, but they must at least have some uniforms in stock somewhere. Do you know where to find the billeting office?”
“Sure, but won’t you be spending your leave with Freddie? Colonel Barncastle? Or is he still laid up?”
Cassandra looked at him questioningly, and then realization came to her face, a mixture of surprise and amusement, and she stopped walking.
“What? Freddie and I? I don’t think my cousin Maude would like that very much. Married, you know.”
“Oh. Well . . . I suppose I just assumed . . . you know, when you said he was your friend.”
“He is my friend. Really, Bitka, do you have a sexual relationship with every one of your female friends? It must be exhausting!”
“No, of course not. I . . . no!”
Sam felt his face flush again—getting to be a habit, he thought.
“Then why would you assume that, simply because I described Freddie as my friend, we were rolling about with each other?”
Good question. The truth was, as much as he had thought he ignored all the gossip about Cassandra’s alleged promiscuity, it must have left some sort of tint on the lens through which he viewed her.
“Because I’m a bloody idiot?” he ventured.
“Well, there is that.” She looked at him a moment and he thought he saw some disappointment back behind her carefully maintained facade. She turned and started walking away.
Sam felt suddenly off-balance. Reality was, it seemed, different than he had been imagining it for weeks, and for those weeks he’d had nothing much to go on but imagination. Now he had to strip away the gossamer web of fantasy from what was real, from what mattered, and he had to do it fast.
Why had he come here? Why did he find himself drawn to her company? Was it her intelligence and curiosity? Her sense of humor? The way she was completely unintimidated by anyone, especially her superiors? Was it the way she would sometimes look at him without turning her head, just moving her eyes, sharing a secret moment?
“Wait,” he heard himself say.
She stopped and turned, her expression a mixture of caution and interest. Interest. That’s something she’d taught him: the difference between idle curiosity and genuine interest.
“What is it, Bitka?”
He caught up and stopped beside her and his mind momentarily went blank. Yeah, what was it?
“Uh . . . I just wanted to say . . . about Lieutenant Washington—”
“I deeply regret that,” Cassandra said, cutting him off, and he saw some of the color drain from her face. “It was no business of mine to judge you and what I said was unnecessarily cruel, especially given your circumstances.”
Sam shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. You were right. Yeah, maybe your timing could have been better, but you were right. I was idealizing her, not really remembering the person she was.”
Cassandra nodded, her expression fixed, noncommittal. She turned away and resumed walking, out the wide portal of the downstation terminal and into the open air of the broad plaza filled with men and women in the uniforms of the different armed services of a half-dozen nations.
He caught up next to her and fell into step. The late afternoon air was cool as the day prepared to give way to evening, with long shadows tangled and snaky at their feet, and thin clouds in the west just beginning to turn pink.
“I mean,” Sam said, “it’s not the first time I’ve done something like that, put a woman up on some kind of pedestal. I’ve been thinking I’m in danger of making the same mistake again, so it’s good to know there’s a solution.”
“Solution? Oh yes, sex,” she said and nodded. “But what of your professional scruples? Doesn’t that put you in a bit of a bind?”
“Oh, she’s not in my chain of command.”
Cassandra stopped and looked around the bustling plaza, studied the unbroken sea of uniforms, and shook her head.
“Here? I hardly see how that’s possible.”
“Well, the thing is . . . I don’t take orders from Limeys.”
She frowned thoughtfully and turned to look at his torso. She picked an imaginary speck of lint from his uniform, smoothed a wrinkle on his chest with the palm of her hand, let it rest there, and looked up at his face.
“We’ll see about that.”
HISTORICAL NOTE
The inspiration for this novel grew from James D. Hornfischer’s stirring and detailed account of the naval campaign in the Solomon Islands (including Guadalcanal) in the second half of 1942—Neptune’s Inferno, but I never intended to shift the events of that campaign wholesale to deep space. A few incidents may be familiar to students of the historical battles, but my main interest was in how officers and sailors—as well as the admirals who led them into battle with varying degrees of success—responded to a war which took them unawares and psychologically unprepared.
My reading concentrated on what it was like to live and work and fight in the smaller ships (and boats) of the Pacific fleet, and that included both memoirs and some novels written by veterans based on their experiences. The most useful were (in no particular order) Russell Sydnor Crenshaw Jr’s South Pacific Destroyer
: The Battle for the Solomons from Savo Island to Vella Gulf, and the same author’s The Battle of Tassafaranga, Capt. Frederick J. Bell’s Condition Red: Destroyer Action in the South Pacific, Forest J. Sterling’s Wake of the Wahoo, William Tuohy’s The Bravest Man: Richard O’Kane and the Amazing Submarine Adventures of the USS Tang, and of course Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Although it covers a different theater and a different set of naval traditions, I also found Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea useful. People do not change so very much, and studying how they reacted and responded once will tell you much about how they will do so again.
A final reason for examining past events is they contain the seeds of future traditions. On February 27, 1942, the cruiser HMS Exeter—which two years earlier had successfully traded salvoes with the German pocket battleship Graf Spee—steamed out of Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies, bound for the Battle of the Java Sea which would be her final action. As she cleared the harbor mouth the crews of the accompanying US destroyers could clearly hear, blaring from her loudspeakers, the song A “Hunting We Will Go.”
USS Puebla Described
USS Puebla (DDR-11) was constructed at the IOS (International Orbital Space-dock) facility from January 2130-July 2131. It was commissioned on September 17, 2131 and, following its shakedown cruise, joined Destroyer Division 3, Destroyer Squadron 2, assigned to the destroyer carrier USS Hornet (CDS-2).
As a destroyer rider (DDR), Puebla does not have an interstellar drive and is transported from one star system to another by its carrier, along with the other eleven DDRs of DesRon 2, nor does it have its own artificial gravity spin habitat. On long-term deployments the crews of the twelve destroyer riders are birthed in the habitat wheels of USS Hornet. The DDRs can operate autonomously within a star system for protracted periods, but after two to five months crews begin to experience adverse health effects from prolonged weightlessness.
Physical Description
Length: 140m
Average Beam: 18m (square cross-section, 15 meters narrowest, 21 meters broadest)
Mass (empty): 5,700 tons
Mass (loaded, excluding reaction mass): 8,400 tons
Mass (loaded, including reaction mass): 18,000 tons
Interior Volume: approximately 32,000 cubic meters
3000 cubic meters crew habitation and work space
1500 cubic meters storage
4500 cubic meters machinery and access space
23,000 cubic meters liquid hydrogen reaction mass (9,600 tons)
Crew: 95
14 Officers
12 Chief Petty Officers
50 Petty Officers
19 Mariner strikers
Machinery
1 x magnetized target fusion (MTF) reactor and direct thruster, 2.25-GW output
• Drive exhaust velocity at maximum thrust: 500,000 m/s (500 km/s)
• Energy input per ton/second of thrust: 83 Kj
• Reaction mass expended per ton/second of thrust: 0.02kg
• Maximum thrust: 27,000 tons
• Reaction mass expended per second at max thrust: 540kg
(32.4 tons/min)
• Reaction mass endurance at maximum thrust: 296.3 minutes
(4.9 hours)
• Acceleration at maximum mass: 1.5G
“Average” acceleration of 2.05G at average mass, (i.e. with half of total reaction mass remaining)
1 x 375-MW thermoelectric multi-cycle Seebeck generator for converting thermal output of fusion reactor, stellar radiation, and internal waste heat, to electricity for ship power and recharging SMESS. (9-min recharge time at full power)
4 x thermal radiator panels (12m x 30m) mounted aft, for discharging unrecoverable waste heat.
6 x low-signature magneto-plasmadynamic (MPD) maneuver drives with a combined thrust of 8,500 tons (83.356525 Mn).
• Drive exhaust velocity at maximum thrust: 100,000 m/s (100 km/s)
• Reaction mass expended per ton/second of thrust: 0.1 kg
• Energy input per ton/second of thrust: 200 Kj
• Maximum thrust: 8,500 tons
• Full thrust endurance on fully-charged SMESS: 117 seconds
• Reaction mass expended per second at max thrust: 0.85tons
• Theoretical acceleration of 0.64G at average mass
2 x superconducting magnetic energy storage systems (SMESS) with combined rated capacity of 200 Gj (sufficient to power the MPD thrusters at full power for 117 seconds, or to generate 100 pulses from point defense lasers or 50 discharges from the spinal coil gun).
Performance
Provides up to 480 Mt/sec of thrust, or approximately 36,266 G/seconds of thrust at average mass, (604 G/minutes, 10.1 G/hours) on direct fusion thrusters.
MPD thrust using fully-charged SMESS: 8,500 tons for 117 seconds (average acceleration of 0.64G).
Combined sprint thrust at average mass: 2.69G
Armament
1 x Mark 19 coil gun, spinally mounted, 32cm bore, 2.8-Gj peak muzzle energy, for launching torpedoes and inert munitions.
38 x DSIM-5B, block four “Fire Lance” torpedoes, each with thirty composite laser rods pumped (once, very briefly) by the 180-kt warhead. Each laser rod generates a single pulse for 2-4 nanoseconds with a total energy of approximately one gigajoule.
• Warhead: 180kt thermonuclear
• 30 composite laser rods, independently targetable
• Each laser rod generates a single 1 GJ pulse for 2-4 nanoseconds
(Virtual) focal array: 0.26 meters
Wavelength: 15 Å (X-ray)
Effective range: 4,000-6,000 km
8 x 1.5 Gj point defense pulse lasers
(Virtual) Focal array: 20 meters
(10 meters actual focal diameter)
Wavelength: 1000 Å (ultraviolet)
Effective range: 7,000-10,000 km
8 x 1.5 Gj point defense pulse lasers
(Virtual) Focal array: 20 meters
(10 meters actual focal diameter)
Wavelength: 1000 Å (ultraviolet)
Effective range: 7,000-10,000 km
Chain of Command Page 39