by Paula Guran
Had Phan never been in a battle? Sabin couldn’t remember. It had been a long time since the Geneva had been under fire.
“Sometimes,” Sabin said. “But we’re generally not a diplomatic ship. Captain Cooper’s weapon components would be different for this mission, and his orders would be constrained.”
“Twenty hours,” Wilmot said, clearly wanting to change the conversation. Protecting Phan? Sabin couldn’t tell. “Does he want us there early to take the action he couldn’t take?”
“He probably wants the show of force,” Graham said. “It’s one thing for a bunch of tiny ships to go after a large ship. It’s another to face twenty ships from our front line.”
Graham had a point. And Sabin had a job to do. She had to get her ship to that location, but she also needed clear instructions from the Alta. The diplomatic mission might be important or it might be something that the front line could scrub.
“I’m going to change,” Sabin said, “and while I’m in my cabin, I’m going to see if I can get clear orders from the Alta on what we need to do when we get to Ukhanda. The last thing we need to do is blunder our way into a crisis.”
Phan looked at her, expression serious. This time, however, Phan didn’t say anything.
Wilmot was still staring at the screen as if he were trying to understand it.
“For the moment, Charlie,” Sabin said to him, “you have the comm. Notify me if anything changes. And do your best to get us to that spot as fast as we can go, would you?”
“Yes, sir,” Wilmot said.
She tugged on her bracelet as she left the bridge. To tell the truth, she was relieved that the dinner wouldn’t happen. She liked action. She liked doing her job, not talking about trivial things.
She was worried about Coop, but he could take care of himself.
Her most important job now was to make sure the Geneva didn’t screw up the Fleet’s plans for the region.
She needed guidance, and she needed it now.
4.
It only took Sabin a few minutes to remove the dress and put on her uniform. Her uniform felt like a second skin to her. She glanced at the bed, her dress with its bow and fancy fabric splayed on top of the coverlet and wondered what she had been thinking. She expected her crew to be prepared on front line.
She should have been too.
Her quarters were the largest on the Geneva, not because she reserved the best for herself, but because regulations insisted. She had to put up with a certain amount of ceremony as captain, and she didn’t like it any more than she liked the dress.
But she appreciated her quarters this evening. Because, unbeknown to most of the crew, the captain’s quarters had a back-up control area, along with its own private communication network. And to get into that area took several layers of identification and approval. Once she was inside—alone—no one else could get in without even more identification and approval from her.
The area was just off her bedroom. A panel in the wall hid the entrance to the back-up control area.
She finger-combed her hair, then went through the various protocols that opened the panel. It slid back, revealing a small space that looked more elaborate than the back-up controls in engineering. In addition to the back-up navigation, piloting, and weaponry, there was an entire console for communications.
She closed the panel, then settled in, facing the communications console. This was where she had usually contacted Coop. In fact, he was the person she spoke to the most from this room.
It felt odd not to contact him at all.
The thought made her just a little shaky. She wasn’t sure why she was so on edge about his message, even though her counselor at the academy would tell her why she was. He would have said that it had to do with her father.
Sabin set that aside.
She took a deep breath, feeling the calm she was known for descending on her.
She put a message through to Command Operations on board the Alta. Command Operations guided the Fleet. It was an organization of top-ranked officials, most of whom had served with distinction as captains of their ships once upon a time. They were the ones who essentially ran the Fleet.
There was a civilian government, but because the Fleet’s origins were military, the power structure remained so. The civilian government took care of general management and often took care of diplomatic relations, but in situations like this one, Command Operations took charge.
Sabin identified herself, and then she said, “I realize I’m not senior captain for the front line, but so far, the senior captain hasn’t checked in.”
And she hoped that message got through: the front line’s senior captain was so far away from his duties that he could come to a support request in a timely fashion.
“We’re heading toward the Ivoire’s position as per Captain Cooper’s request. We’ll be there in less than twelve hours. But we all have some questions about the mission.”
Finally the screen across from her winked on, revealing the faces of several members of Command Operations. She had met two of them, including General Zeller who had been the first to question her abilities to captain, more than twenty years ago. The other three faces looked familiar, of course, and even if she hadn’t known them by reputation, the listing of names and credentials below their images would have helped her understand who she was talking to.
The faces seemed to float against a black background. Long ago, Command Operations had established its communications imagery to show only the pertinent information and nothing more. In conversation with a captain, only the faces had been deemed pertinent.
“Your mission or Captain Cooper’s?” asked General Nawoki, the other person that Sabin had met personally. She barely knew General Nawoki, although she admired Nawoki’s military record. Nawoki was one of the few officers who had defended her ship—with no loss of life—in a four-day prolonged battle after her anacapa had broken down. At one point, overrun by the enemy, she managed to stave off boarding and ship capture by reengineering half of the lifepods into weapons.
“I’m interested in both missions,” Sabin said. “According to what little we saw of the attack, Captain Cooper did not fire on the ships. Speculation from our Sector Research team is that these ships are Quurzod, and we know that the Ivoire was on a pre-diplomatic mission to the Quurzod. I need to know—the entire front line needs to know—if we’re not to fire on those ships, or if the diplomatic mission is off.”
The members of Command Operations did not look at each other—that she could tell, anyway. She had no idea how the cameras were set up in Command Operations. She didn’t even have a high enough rank to enter the level on the Alta that housed Command Operations, let alone ever go into the room.
“Anything else?” Nawoki asked.
“When we arrive,” Sabin said, “who runs the mission? The front line commander or Captain Cooper?”
“Why do you care now?” Zeller asked.
Sabin glanced at him. His face had more lines than it had when she was in school, but his eyes remained the same. Steel gray, flat, and cold. She had tried not to hate him back then. Given the resentment she felt now as she looked at him, she wondered if she had been successful.
“It will make a difference as to how we plan our response. A cursory study of the ships on front line tells me that none of us have the kind of diplomatic experience that the crew of the Ivoire have, and if this is still a diplomatic mission, then—”
“We will get back to you,” Nawoki said, and the images vanished from the screen. The contact had been severed.
Sabin stood and let herself out of the room, leaving the panel open in case Command Operations responded immediately. She didn’t want anything to record the expression that she had barely been able to keep off her face inside that room.
She knew why Zeller had asked her why she cared now. The bastard thought she was panicking. Even after fifteen years of exemplary command, he thought some ship slipping into foldspace made her
panic.
Then she let out a long breath. Maybe she was misjudging him. Maybe the problem was something else entirely, a diplomatic problem that no one in Command Operations could discuss in front of her.
She stretched, trying to relax her muscles, and willed herself to focus on the moment.
The past did not matter, whether it was her past relationship with General Zeller or the disappearance of her father.
What mattered was this mission, and how she would handle it. How her crew would handle it. How the front line would handle it.
And whether or not they would imperil a diplomatic mission.
And if anyone in Command Operations asked her about her reasons for asking questions, she would not be defensive. She would answer honestly. She would tell them she wanted to do what was best for the Fleet.
Because she did.
5.
Her first encounter with George Zeller had come more than two decades before, when he was still a major. He reluctantly ran the counselors in the evaluation section of the academy’s officer training program and, she later learned, he had taken no interest in the psychological evaluations or their necessity until she enrolled.
Correction: until she enrolled and did well.
Then, apparently, Major George Zeller made it his business to prove that she wasn’t fit to command anything larger than an engineering staff on a third-class Fleet vessel.
He had been younger then, not just in age or experience, but in manner. He had red hair and green eyes that flashed when he was angry, which to her, seemed like all of the time.
He was the one who mentioned her father’s disappearance to the academy staff, he was the one who believed that disappearance would cause problems, and he was the one who insisted on psychological training so rigorous that Sabin had to go without sleep for days to complete the testing and her schoolwork. When she complained to the head of her department, he moved the testing to dates between the school terms, enabling her to at least get some rest.
She always tested well, but Zeller kept accusing her of gaming the system. She finally reported him to his superior, one Colonel Gaines who would eventually disappear himself in an anacapa accident two years later. She never quite got over the irony of that; Zeller never got over the fact that she went over his head.
He might have overcome it, had she failed in Officer Training, but she had graduated first in her class, with high honors, the only person in twenty years to get a perfect score on all of the final term tests—including the physical ones.
She never quite figured out what Zeller had against her; other students had lost parents to accidents, disappearances, and explosions, and Zeller had never taken an interest in them.
Just her.
It wasn’t until years later, after she had become a captain, that she found a reference to Zeller in her father’s file. The record itself was mostly redacted. What did exist was deliberately vague.
After that discovery, she told herself that Zeller’s reactions to her came from survivor’s guilt, but she never really wanted to test that theory. So she avoided him whenever possible.
In fact, she had avoided him for more than a decade.
Until now.
6.
A soft, almost inaudible cheep let Sabin know that the screen had activated. She slipped back into her chair, letting the panel close behind her.
Only one face floated in the blackness—that of General Nawoki. She looked tired, but Sabin didn’t know if that was her natural state.
“We are getting conflicting reports from Ukhanda,” Nawoki said. “The Xenth claim that the Quurzod killed all but three of the team members the Ivoire sent to the Quurzod. The Quurzod claim that the Ivoire’s team violated Quurzod law and declared war. Word from some of the other cultures on Ukhanda is that the Quurzod are quick to offend and even quicker to use violence to punish the offenders. Unfortunately, the Ivoire herself has not sent us their report on the incident, so we have no way to assess the truth of the interaction. In other words, hold back until the Ivoire returns from foldspace, and let Captain Cooper lead the response.”
It sounded like a mess and reinforced to Sabin, yet again, that she wanted nothing to do with actual diplomatic missions.
“Captain Cooper said he would keep the Ivoire in foldspace for twenty hours. We’ll arrive eight hours before he returns. Should we stay out of the area until we have word of the Ivoire?”
Nawoki’s lips thinned. She glanced over her shoulder at someone or something that Sabin could not see. Either Nawoki disagreed with the command she was about to give, or she was giving that command over the disagreements of others.
Sabin had no way to know which was true, only that Nawoki seemed as uncomfortable about the situation as Sabin felt.
“If those small ships remain, then stay out of the area,” Nawoki said.
“And if they show up after we enter the same area?”
“Try to ascertain whose ships they are. See if they will negotiate or explain their position.”
Sabin’s breath caught, and she had to struggle to hold back her initial reaction. She had hoped that Command Operations had known to whom those ships belonged.
“Do we have any theories about who the ships belong to?” she asked.
“The Xenth say they are Quurzod ships, but our other sources on Ukhanda cannot confirm,” Nawoki said.
“And forgive me, sir, but why aren’t we trusting the Xenth?”
“Because we are getting conflicting signals from them. They claim they want peace with the Quurzod, but they are building their own military. Our Sector Research Team is also locating some evidence that the breaches of previous agreements might have come at the instigation of the Xenth rather than through the general warlike nature of the Quurzod.”
Coop’s voice echoed in Sabin’s mind: Do you ever question it? Our mission. Or at least part of our mission. What makes us so smart?
“Were we planning to broker on the side of the Xenth?” Sabin asked, feeling like Phan—naïve and a bit out of her depth, and hoping the General wouldn’t notice or would take pity and answer her.
“We believed we could bring peace to Ukhanda,” Nawoki said primly.
What makes us so smart? The memory of Coop’s voice floated through Sabin’s mind. She had to concentrate to keep his doubts from infecting her.
“We believed, sir?” she asked.
“Something went wrong, Captain,” Nawoki said. “And after we recover the Ivoire, we will figure out what that something was.”
7.
The rest of the trip to the Ukhandan part of the sector was uneventful. Captain Seamus Cho of the Bellator finally took over his role as commander of the front line. He had, apparently, been holding a bachelor party for a crew member and hadn’t heard the summons in all of the ruckus.
In Sabin’s opinion, Cho did not seem concerned enough about the Ivoire or the situation near Ukhanda. But he was operating under the same orders that Sabin was, and so she knew he would at least wait, the way she would have, for the Ivoire to reappear.
Coop would be sensible, and he would know what to do.
As the front line approached an hour sooner than planned, the small ships remained, patrolling the area as if they expected the Ivoire to return.
Most ships with strong sensors left a fighting region shortly after a Fleet ship disappeared. The sensors would show that the Fleet ship had left somehow and was not cloaked. Even ships that had poor sensors would get the message after eleven hours.
Either these small ships knew how the Fleet used their anacapa drives or the commanders of those ships were extremely stubborn, holding that small region of space as proof that they had conquered it.
Cho ordered the entire front line to remain just outside of standard sensor range—close enough to join any fight should the Ivoire return suddenly, but far enough away for a battle to be a struggle for any ships with planetside bases.
Finally, after eighteen hours, the small ship
s gathered into a V-shaped pattern and headed back toward Ukhanda. The entire front line tracked them, but did not see the ships go back to a base on the planet. Instead, they went past Ukhanda toward a small satellite that looked like it was part of an uninhabited sister planet.
Cho should have sent a ship to investigate, but he didn’t. He believed their mission was to rescue the Ivoire, not to pursue the Ivoire’s attackers.
Sabin couldn’t argue with him. She might have made the same call herself, had she had command of the front line. It seemed as if Cho was as leery of getting involved in any diplomatic incident as she had been.
Finally, thirty minutes from the twenty-hour mark, he ordered the front line to prepare to defend the Ivoire. The front line would move slowly forward, not enough to attract attention from Ukhanda, but enough to get them in better range of the Ivoire.
They had covered half the distance to the Ivoire’s last location when twenty hours came.
And went.
No one panicked. The anacapa drive could be finicky, and all of the captains had miscommunicated or misestimated their time in foldspace at one point or another.
Twenty-one hours passed.
Then twenty-two.
And finally, the front line got nervous.
Cho gave the standard search orders. A standard three-dimensional search pattern should have used twenty-four ships, but the front line didn’t have that many. Besides, a few had to remain in position, in case the Ivoire returned later.
Cho assigned sixteen ships to the grid search, and left three ships in a waiting position. The fourth ship would go to an area not to far from the Ivoire’s return site—close enough to be a bit dangerous, but far enough to prevent most collisions from happening.
That ship would be the most vulnerable: if the Ivoire returned to slightly different coordinates and the other ship’s failsafes did not work, the ships might collide. But it was a standard risk at this point in delayed anacapa response.
Cho contacted Sabin before making the assignment. He used a private channel so that the other ships couldn’t hear their conversation, even though the bridge crew could.
He turned up on her screen, tall and stately in his uniform. He had zoomed out the image so that she could see his entire bridge crew, who looked as busy and focused as hers.