Tessler was carrying a compad as was his invariable custom. As he sat down, he looked after Tang and Rom-Sanchez with a sour expression that deepened the frown lines on his long face.
“Our newest lieutenant seems pretty casual about his first alpha,” he said. “Or does he think that fantasy Phalanx is a good warm up for Tactical?”
“I can think of worse,” replied Nilotis mildly, with a glance at Tessler’s compad.
Tessler’s lips tightened. Scuttlebutt had it that Tessler had entered the Academy with high hopes for a fighting career, with patronage linked to the Aerenarch. That he’d ended up in Supply was, Nilotis suspected, in large part because he had found the Tenno tactical glyphs difficult to master. There was nothing wrong with that—the Navy needed logisticians as good as Tessler. But it wasn’t good enough for the man himself.
“Well, he’ll hardly gain any rank points kissing up to Warrigal.”
Kissing up. Like too many Downsider officers, whose families were satellites to the older Tetrad Centrum clans, Tessler tended to see things first in terms of Douloi preference, then Naval rank. A regrettably common viewpoint among many connected to the Aerenarch—especially those not invited to Narbon.
“They’re distantly related, I understand,” said Nilotis, “and both in Tactical.” Tessler’s face soured even more at the reminder that the two juniors would have to acknowledge some acquaintance, given their families’ relationship. “The Warrigals freighted Rom-Sanchez’s Highdwelling, I don’t know, three or four centuries back.” And the Warrigal shipping interests have helped start Highdwellings many times, since before there was a Panarchy, in fact. So Rom-Sanchez has little to worry about from you, especially since they’re both under me, not in Supply.
“As you say,” said Tessler, somewhat stiffly, pushing his chair back a bit. Nilotis tended to loom over just about anyone on the ship. He called Nyangathanka home, a planet deep in the Tetrad Centrum that had joined the Panarchy in the first century of Jaspar’s Peace. There I go, doing the same right back at him. Disgusted with himself, Nilotis leaned back in his chair.
“I suppose it’s harmless enough,” Tessler continued. “It’s not as though she’s likely to have much to do otherwise, given the circumstances of her transfer from Narbon. No rank points, came out as she went in, an Ensign.”
Nilotis shrugged. “Captain seems happy enough with her. So am I. Her doctorate in tactical semiotics, coming so early, doesn’t hurt.”
“Doesn’t help much, either that I can see,” replied Tessler. “Close to a calculated insult to turn in a game as a thesis. A game,” he repeated in disgust. “While the Aerenarch struggles to build up the Navy to face a real threat.”
Nilotis managed not to roll his eyes. Dol’jhar again.
“Sorry, Eisel, I just can’t see a failed serial-chip empire as a real threat. It shattered like glass after Acheront. What’s left is maybe ten or fifteen planets with raving sociopaths barely in control, while Sodality syndicates make a fortune smuggling and jacker raids keep them off balance.” Nilotis laughed. “If they start to get out of line, there are entire Rifter fleets willing to take them on if we open up the Dol’jharian sector for bidding on a Writ.”
“You just don’t get it,” said Tessler in exasperation. “Why did we just spend seven months out-octant from Rouge Nord? Because Eichelly dropped out of sight two years ago, just like Charterly and others.”
Nilotis snorted. “No surprise there. There were enough derogations to have put his Writ under litigation a dozen times over. The Justicials vacated it just before we left on patrol.”
“Exactly. It took them over a year, which ended up costing the Navy three battlecruiser tours of duty, plus who knows how many destroyer squadron tours? And that’s just for our assigned recognizance. It’s happening elsewhere. Raving sociopath or not, the Avatar of Dol’jhar is dispersing our forces.”
“To do what? With one capital ship?” asked Nilotis, wearying of the familiar argument. Tessler could hardly be expected to feel otherwise, not and expect to retain his connection to the Aerenarch, who would never forgive the murderer of his mother.
“You know how I see this. Eichelly, those others, are just part of the natural expansion of the Peace. He’s deep out-octant by now, establishing some petty fiefdom. He’ll either end up plasma, Shiidra food, or the founder of a polity that a few centuries from now will be petitioning for a protectorate. Yes, it costs tours of duty. That’s how it works, so I think it’s pretty senseless to build up a core fleet that never leaves the Tetrad Centrum.”
The first watch-change bells sounded, interrupting Tessler’s reply, and Nilotis shifted his attention, watching the group around Warrigal break up and hurry to the hatch, on their way to the ready room. Tessler watched, too, stiff with disapproval.
They are cutting it close, Nilotis thought.
Warrigal, now alone, was still tapping intently at her compad as though nothing had changed. She often seemed to be in a world of her own, as though walking in the Dreamtime of her ancestors on Lost Earth. Was that why Captain Ng hadn’t yet given her a shot at alpha, despite her tactical skills?
Tessler followed the direction of his gaze, and snorted. “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” He scooped his compad off the table and stalked out of the wardroom.
Relieved, Nilotis settled back to his watching-not-watching. He’d been working hard, and this was his wind-down before he hit the rack. He’d sleep through emergence so he could be fresh for Wolakota. Rom-Sanchez could handle this emergence in his sleep. Once he got used to being on the bridge under the captain’s eye. After all, what could possibly happen?
o0o
In the last few seconds of the countdown to emergence, Ng looked around Grozniy’s bridge, wishing she could have more time with this new alpha crew, young as some of them were. They were smart, ambitious, and several of them were perhaps a bit too unconventional for their own good—just as she had been twenty-five years back. She hoped that their new captains would recognize their potential. Especially Rom-Sanchez. Aside from a regrettable emotional distraction of the sort she’d dealt with before, he’d demonstrated command potential on this cruise, and not just at Smyrna.
“Emergence.”
The descending tones of the bells blended with the quiet voice of the navigator as the battlecruiser Grozniy dropped back into fourspace with a barely perceptible shudder.
After a pause Lieutenant Mzinga looked up, puzzled. “No beacon, sir.”
Captain Margot O’Reilly Ng leaned forward in her command pod.
“Siglnt. Verify.”
Yeo Wychyrski at Siglnt tapped scrupulously at her console, her profile intent. Lieutenant Rom-Sanchez glanced at Ng from the tactical pod; she briefly checked his display echo next to the main screen and noted with approval that he was already setting up the appropriate range of presets for a no-beacon emergence.
“All sensors functional, sir,” Wychyrski sang out. “No beacon.”
“Navigation, tactical skip, now.” The fiveskip’s faint basso profundo hummed momentarily. “Confirm our position. Engage drunkwalk skip-orbit around our emergence point at five light seconds. Tactical, take us to threat-level one.” Grozniy had come in using a standard trojan attractor point, so there was little doubt of where they were within a few light minutes.
Ng saw the impact of her orders in the postures of the crew, especially those new to alpha: transformed from nervous, under-the-captain’s-eye alertness to eager anticipation. Mzinga and Rom-Sanchez barely had time to echo her orders before the engineering officer sang out “Engineering reports teslas at threat-level one,” a heartbeat ahead of other station confirmations.
The Tenno rippled, accommodating the sudden change in position. “No ship traces within skipmissile range,” reported Wychyrski moments later.
Aside from the derogation at Smyrna, which had turned out to be a private Rifter feud that the losing party had tried to turn around by bringing in the Navy, it had been a long, boring patro
l out-octant from Rouge-Nord. Lots of time for drills, including, just a few weeks ago, the standard beacon-bashing scenario, where jackers destroyed the navigational beacon and fivespace conditions transponder, hoping to delay passing ships long enough for an intercept. Not very likely, now that they had returned to the Thousand Suns proper: Wolakota was just inside the ill-defined outer border of Rouge Nord octant. But still . . .
Decision crystallized in her. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.
“Lieutenant Rom-Sanchez,” she said.
He turned to her, startled, reminding her even more of a puppy, with his large brown eyes and curly dark hair that had the vestige of an cowlick over one eye, strictly clipped.
She’d used his name rather than his station. She saw comprehension dawning in him just ahead of her next words.
“Your captain just dropped dead, and you’re senior.” She smiled at the stricken expression on his face. “But I’ll leave you the rest of the crew, and I’ll take Tactical. You have the con.” With a swipe of her hand she transferred control to him, and took the tactical feed.
Rom-Sanchez blushed to the ears, then shifted his focus to the unremarkable starfield now on the main screen. Ng saw some of the crew watching him, especially the two other members of what some officers derisively called “the L-5 Loonies” that she’d chosen for alpha: Ensigns Wychyrski and Ammant, SigInt and Communications. To the crew’s credit, there was no trace of schadenfreude or malice in anyone’s expression, often a problem when a potential lower-orbit junior officer was put on the spot.
Lieutenant Mzinga was not watching Rom-Sanchez. His fingers were dancing over the nav console, correlating the data delivered by the sensors scattered over the seven-kilometer-long hull of the Grozniy. The precision lent by its size enabled a battlecruiser to orient faster than any other ship in the absence of the flood of data furnished by a navigational beacon. The older officer appeared absorbed, but Ng detected the faintest compression of lips indicating a suppressed laugh.
A bit more quickly than she’d expected, Rom-Sanchez spoke, with only a trace of a stammer before he dropped into bridge cadence, the almost-singsong speech pattern that they learned in the academy as part of bridge protocol, meant to project a uniform impression of calm and control. “AyKay. I have the con. SigInt, crunch a ship-centric mass and energy summary for me while nav is working.” He hesitated briefly. “Tactical, work up a threat assessment assuming we’re at the Wolakota leading trojan. If jackers took out the beacon, what are we likely facing, given the strategic situation here?”
Ng saw from the tactical setup now on her console that he hadn’t gotten to threat assessment before she’d ambushed him, but he was doubtless more concerned about that lack than she was. So far, so good.
“Spectrum match to Wolakota primary. Elevated asteroid density around the ship,” reported SigInt. “Looks like a lot of collisional evolution, not much to hide behind. A good deal of asteroid thermal scatter sunward. Matches a trojan point emergence.”
Like most systems with one or more gas giants in it, the Wolakota system had an asteroid belt inward from the sunward giant.
Ng watched Rom-Sanchez drumming his fingers on the arm of his pod as he stared at the main viewscreen. She would have preferred to see him observing the crew: the scattered points of light displayed there would reveal nothing. If it’s Rifters, they’ll skip the second they see our pulse. A battlecruiser generated an emergence pulse that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Depending on how far out the Rifters were hiding, the Grozniy had only minutes before its prey fled.
“Very well,” Rom-Sanchez said. Again, the slight hesitation. “Tactical, give me a sigma on hiding places.”
Ng popped up one of the Rom-Sanchez’s preset windows on the main screen, a colorful probability plot centered on the assumed position of the ship. The plot shifted as Mzinga straightened up, his task finished.
“Position confirmed, sir. Wolakota system, absolute bearing 30.6 mark 358.8, plus 47 light-minutes.” His mellow voice was even, but Ng heard his excitement in the quicker pace of his words. “That puts our initial emergence within one light-minute of the beacon’s position at the leading trojan attractor of Wolakota Six.”
That was as expected: their by-the-book approach had let the fivespace well created by the trojan attractor pull them into the system.
“No alerts on local widecasts. No links found,” reported Ammant at Communications. The local authorities were either not alarmed or playing it safe.
Ng glanced at the sigma plot, reading the Tenno glyphs overlaid on it with the facility born of twenty-five years’ practice. The asteroid belt sunward of their position was indicated on the plot by a series of faint green ring segments—k-zones—separated by the Kirkwood gaps where the periodic interaction with Wolakota Six swept away the debris left over from the system’s formation. The rings’ patterns, and various glyphs, indicated probable density, composition, and other tactically important information. A few yellow dots marked the position of major asteroids.
The plot had one lobe flaring the red of maximum probability, about fifteen light-minutes away, concentrated in the ecliptic in the closest k-zone to Six. Nothing there we didn’t already know—the average calc time for commercial traffic is about thirty minutes or so—probably more given the fivespace conditions in this stellar neighborhood.
Commercial traffic at the leading trojan was ships passing through the system, who couldn’t skip locally any great distance without further compromising their safety on the next leg of their fivespace journey. That’d give their hypothetical Rifters—no doubt hiding behind a chunk of rock or ice, as usual—sufficient time intercept their prey.
It also meant that the Grozniy now had something less than fifteen minutes to find the intruders—if the beacon’s destruction had indeed been deliberate.
Rom-Sanchez tapped his console and a countdown windowed up in a corner of the main screen, starting at ten minutes. Good! He was settling into his role as acting captain, and pushing the crew. His next order was crisp.
“Navigation, take us in to within five light-seconds of the attractor point. Siglnt, run a scan for debris and radiation. Extrapolate time of destruction if you find traces.”
The plot shifted as the fiveskip burped. One glyph indicated the presence of a Fleet tactical transponder nearby. Rom-Sanchez tapped at his console, highlighting the tacponder.
“SigInt, pop that tacponder and update Tactical immediately for threat assessment. Check its monitor status.”
Ng saw the impact, minor as it was, of the unnecessary last order: a slight hitch in the otherwise smooth flow of activity on the bridge. There was a brief silence on the bridge as Ensign Wychyrski began the scan. A window from Communications popped up on Ng’s console.
“No data from transponder,” she said. “Last update plus four months, no new threats reported, monitor mode off. Latest Wolakota data plus seven months, Pulwaiya tacponder.” That had been on their way out-octant.
“Tactical, assessment?”
“Worst case, Eichelly’s back, sine lege. Four Alphas in his fleet, three of them third-tranche.” It took a minimum of three destroyers to take on a battlecruiser, so the possibility they were facing a renegade Writ-holder with four of them made Eichelly a credible threat, even though one of his destroyers was more than 400 years old.
Rom-Sanchez’s eyes flicked towards Ng, and this time he hesitated a bit longer— too long—but then his shoulders straightened. “Very well. Take us to threat-level two.”
By the book, so far. “AyKay. Ship status to threat-level two.” Rom-Sanchez betrayed mingled relief and desperation as Ng fell into bridge alert cadence and echoed his order, followed by the other stations’ secondary confirmations: relief that she hadn’t countermanded him, desperation that she wasn’t taking the con back.
I’m not taking you off the hook yet. They still didn’t have confirmation of hostile activity, and tactically, it was impossible that more t
han one destroyer would be able to take a shot at them at the beginning of an engagement, given a battlecruiser’s sensor platform. Not that any jacker would be insane enough to do so. In any case, there was no danger to Grozniy, now that its shields were powered up sufficiently. They were still tracking the standard scenario: nothing Rom-Sanchez couldn’t handle, if he didn’t over-think things.
The brassy tones of the alert pealed out, followed by the hiss of the tianqi increasing the airflow into the bridge. Ng breathed in, aware of the faint bergamot scent fading, replaced by a complex of pine, jasmine, and less familiar scents, calculated to promote alertness, balanced with rose and jumari, for relief of stress. She knew, but could not sense, that the conditioners were also raising the ionization level slightly, and cycling faint subsonics at irregular intervals in a pattern that reached deep into the human thalamus with the age-old message: thunderstorm coming, be alert!
The aft hatch whispered open. Commander Krajno slipped into the pod on her left side, giving her a glance of muted surprise as he brought up his console.
“Dead again, eh?” Krajno’s gravelly voice perfectly matched his craggy, amiable face, like that of a boxer whose guard had been less than perfect during his career. It was a deceptive facade—Ng considered him one of the sharpest officers in the Fleet.
Wychyrski sang out, “Debris detected. Crystalline stress patterns of debris consonant with skipmissile impact. Dispersion indicates destruction about one hour ago, plus or minus ten minutes.”
Skipmissile, and only an hour past—that’s like a front-row seat.
Ng grinned at Krajno. His answering grin was feral, anticipating action after months of tedious patrol and training; Perthes was too scrupulous an executive officer not to get out of the rack when his captain ran drills at all hours, even if he didn’t have to.
Rom-Sanchez glanced their way. Ng kept her manner neutral, and knew Perthes was doing the same. Show time. Her fingers tingled, longing for the feel of the command console, but taking control now would teach entirely the wrong lesson, possibly even destroy a budding career. She had to demonstrate her confidence in him.
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