Having, in his mind at least, put Max in his place, Duflot explained his plan for delivering the envoy to Rashid. “The details are on this data chip for you to bring back to your ship, as I certainly don’t expect you to be able to remember all of this. The overall theory, though, is simple enough for you to understand: move the group in a safe series of orderly jumps along a well-protected route, through secure and well-scanned star systems, taking advantage of local forces in place where available. This provides maximum protection for the envoy and the greatest likelihood of delivering him to the conference without incident.”
Max had listened to the commander’s plan with growing disbelief. “Sir, do I understand the Commander correctly that we are going to jump from inhabited system to inhabited system, and then make the crossing from one jump point to the next on pure circumferential courses with no evasion, in convoy formation, broadcasting our location by using active sensors?”
“That’s correct. How is that difficult to understand? All of those systems are listed by their various sector commands as having been cleared of enemy forces, and most have planet-based sensor coverage and some sort of defensive forces in place to give us additional protection. When in those systems, we will be safe from attack by definition. I can’t imagine any safer and more prudent course of action.”
Max was almost dizzy with the staggering imbecility of the plan. “Sir, with all due respect, why not just go straight to Rashid? Straight shot across interstellar space with a few deceptive zigs and zags thrown in. This ship’s an Edward Jenner class frigate—she can sustain 1865 c. If your engineer is on the ball, 1885 or even 1890. The destroyers attached to the group can keep up with that easily. If the enemy were searching with a hundred ships, she wouldn’t be able to find us absent the wildest stroke of luck. And if they found us, they’d have a hard time catching us at those speeds, much less being able to manage any sort of attack.
“They can’t attack us if they can’t find us. We don’t need planet-based sensor coverage and forces in place. Let the infinity of interstellar space be our coverage! Let speed and elusiveness be our defense! We’ll have the envoy on Rashid drinking the best coffee in the galaxy before the rat-faces even know we’ve set out. It’s foolproof. I’ll even tell Admiral Hornmeyer that it was your idea. Didn’t Napoleon say When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna? When you set out to go to Rashid, go to Rashid.” Max looked at Duflot hopefully. He thought he had made a compelling, logical case.
Instead, Duflot looked at him with unconcealed horror, even fear, which soon turned to rage. “Are you out of your mind? Take an irreplaceable negotiator, on the most important diplomatic mission of the past fifty years, practically naked through open, unprotected space? No sensor coverage? No forces in place? No certification from sector command that the area has been cleared of enemy forces? Who knows what forces the enemy has lurking out there? And if we’re attacked, we’d be days away from any help.
“No. Absolutely not. That course of action would be impulsive. Rash. Full of unwarranted risk. I’m surprised that you have the temerity even to suggest it.”
“But sir, it is a very common tactic in Admiral Hornmeyer’s command, and also under Admiral Bushinko. The probability of success is very high.”
Duflot slammed his hand, palm down, onto the desk. “Probability! I can’t deal in probability. This is warfare, not the gaming tables on Nouvelle Monaco! I have to guarantee the safe delivery of the envoy, and that means layering on as many different kinds of security, defense, and protection as possible. I must take every conceivable measure, not roll the dice in some daredevil speed run across the void.”
“Sir, with all due respect, warfare is full of gambles and calculated risks. Admiral Hornmeyer constantly refers to his most critical decisions as bets. I must insist that the course of action I suggest is far less risky and far more likely to result—”
“You insist? You dare to insist to a superior officer? You are insubordinate, mister. Your remarks have been recorded. If you are not strictly obedient to my orders in this regard, I will be certain that Admiral Hornmeyer receives a copy of the recording. And if you attempt to go over my head on this, I will see you court martialed. You have your orders. Now go back to your ship and carry them out, to the letter. You are dismissed.”
He sent Max away with a sketchy, imprecise salute. As Max was marching to the door, Duflot called out, “Oh, Robichaux, one more thing. The envoy would like to see you while you are on board. He’s in the VIP quarters. I’m sure you can find your way.”
Max assured Duflot that he could and made his exit. With years of service on this class of vessel, Max was able to go straight to his destination, one deck “up” and aft about twenty meters. He gave his name and rank to the Marine at the door.
“The envoy’s expecting you, sir,” said the Marine, with genuine respect. “Go right in.” He shouldered his pulse rifle, entered the access code, palmed the scanner, and the hatch opened.
Max went in. On this class of frigate, the VIP quarters were divided into three compartments, an office-like day cabin, a small but comfortable sitting room jokingly called the “parlor,” and a berth cabin. The day cabin was empty, but Max heard a voice booming out of the parlor. “In here, Robichaux. I’m sure you’re tired of standing in front of a desk!”
Max stepped through the open door into the next compartment. Lounging in a comfortable chair, with his feet on a stool, was the envoy. He was taller than Max. A LOT taller than Max, and thinner. Whereas Max was built like a quarterback from American football, Commodore Doland looked to be built for basketball. He had dark hair, brown eyes, and a brownish complexion with high cheekbones that spoke of some Native American ancestry along with the predominating European, and he could have been anywhere between forty and sixty years of age. His smile was warm.
Doland held in his left hand a glass containing about an inch and a half of an amber liquid and a few pieces of ice. Max started to draw himself up to salute.
“Lose the salute, son. Don’t you know that there’s a regulation that says you never salute a seated man with a glass of whisky in his hand?” He extended his right hand. Max shook it. “Joseph A. Doland, Commodore, Envoy, Instigator, and Negotiator, at your service.”
“Max Robichaux, pleased to meet you, sir.”
“You too, son. Build yourself a drink and have a seat. After twenty minutes with Duflot, you’ve earned it.” Max wondered how the envoy knew that the meeting had lasted almost exactly twenty minutes. “I need a drink every time I have to talk to that narrow-minded, little…let’s just leave the noun out, shall we? You deserve a reward for not pulling out that sidearm of yours and shooting Emperor Duflot the First back there.”
Max poured himself some of Kentucky’s best and sat in the chair indicated by the envoy. He took a sip. “Emperor?”
“Yep. That’s what his men call him. I’ve never seen anyone so high and mighty, and I’ve met with the president—this one and the last one—more than a dozen times. Apparently the last subordinate to sit in his presence was the ship’s cat who has, by the way, jumped ship and is now on a repair tender.”
“I’m sure that did wonders for morale.”
“I’m told it did, Max. You don’t mind if I call you Max, do you?”
“No, sir, not at all.” Max found himself warming to the envoy, who had a disarming, natural charisma and personal warmth, mixed somehow with a cool, calculating intellect that understood people very, very well. Doland, Max thought, might have done very well centuries ago as a riverboat gambler.
“And when we’re in here, drop the ‘sir.’ Everyone calls me ‘Ollie,’ and I’d be grateful if you would as well.” Max nodded his acceptance. “Now, Max, that you’ve met with our friend, the Emperor, what do you think of him, and more importantly, what do you think of his plan to get me to the conference?”
“Well, s—…Ollie, if I may speak
freely about both—”
“Max, I don’t ask questions unless I expect straightforward, honest answers. So, shoot straight and we’ll let the medics sort them out.”
“Then, I have to tell you that I don’t think much of either.”
“Go on.”
“Any man who is so insecure that he has to come up with a dozen or so ways to snub a newly frocked destroyer skipper has got problems that an extra rotation through command school won’t cure. If his lack of confidence is that fundamental, and if his handling of a key subordinate is so incompetent, the man has no business commanding a warship. Sorry, but that’s how I see it.”
“I’m not going to disagree with you. Unfortunately, he’s got friends, or should I say a brother, in high places. What about the plan?”
“I haven’t heard anything as stupid since I was a squeaker listening to other squeakers refight the last battle the way they would do it if they were in command. He’s likely to screw the mission.”
“More than likely.”
“Can’t you do something about it? You’re a commodore.”
“Afraid not. I rank him but I’m not in his chain of command. The only orders I can give around here that get followed have to do with the dinner menu and who gets let into my quarters. I’m not even assigned to the Tactical Command any more. You know how that happened, right?”
Max shook his head.
“Nav error. I was a battleship captain—USS Gary Tyler. Officer of the Deck jumped her through the Charlie jump point in the Divisio-Bilbon system instead of the Bravo, and we wound up in the middle of a border skirmish between the Themp-Ra and the Ghrinn that was just about to graduate to being a full-grown war. The only way I could save my ship was to broker a ceasefire between them, which I did, followed by a peace treaty. So now, instead of leading men into battle, at which—I might add—I was not too shabby, I’m now the Union’s new ‘gifted negotiator.’ All things being equal, I’d much rather fight. Bottom line, though, is I have no authority over Duflot and no chance of having my operational orders followed on this ship.”
“Then we’re pretty well screwed.”
“Now, don’t jump to conclusions, Max. I’m sure some sort of creative solution will occur to you.”
“You’re not suggesting that I—”
“No, son, not at all. I’m not suggesting anything except that you keep an open mind and that you take advantage of any opportunity to save the mission that might happen to present itself. I’ll help you any way that I can.” He drained his glass and set it down.
“I do, however, hope that your creativity manifests itself in its usual way, because this mission has got to succeed. I’m not talking about saving my hide either. I mean that this envoy has got to get to the conference and that the conference has got to come up with a four-way framework for conducting this war. Because if we don’t,” he gestured toward the bottle on the bar, “there’s a lot of whisky aging in a lot of barrels up on the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, not to mention Scotland and Ireland, that will go to waste because there won’t be any people left to drink it.”
“What an appalling breach of military courtesy, not to mention the kind of affront that an officer and a gentleman never inflicts upon another. It’s an insult to the honor of this ship and every man aboard her. I won’t stand for it.”
Kraft was boiling over, and he had actually cooled down a little over the past few minutes. His first responses had been so profane, in both German and Standard, that Max was genuinely embarrassed. Apparently, on Kraft’s homeworld, all the best insults were in German and involved ascribing to the insulted man’s ancestors a propensity to engage in sexual relations with various species of farm animals.
“Major, we know the man is an asshole,” Max soothed. “The days of settling affronts to a man’s personal honor by beginning the day with pistols for two and coffee for one are long past. He’s a superior officer and he commands this group. I take his shit and we follow his orders. It’s that simple. His insults were either subtle snubs that he can plausibly say were all inadvertent and not meant to offend, or else they took place in his day cabin with no witnesses. The best I can say about the whole thing is that he was not able to provoke me into an outburst of anger—which for all I knew he was trying to do—and that I managed to avoid being put on report.”
“What would he have put you on report for?” DeCosta was incredulous.
“Being out of uniform. He didn’t like that I was wearing my sidearm when the Uniform of the Day on the William Gorgas was dress blues, not dress blues with arms.”
“That’s…that’s…that’s…just chickenshit. Sorry, sir, but that’s the only word for it.” DeCosta was inarticulate with anger at first, but once he got pointed where he wanted, he steadied his helm on the new heading.
“It’s a purely chickenshit thing to put someone on report for. Never in a million years would I put a man on report for something like that, unless it was some sort of willfully defiant repeat offense. I’d point out the error, tell him not to do it again, and be done with the matter. Life’s too short for that kind of picayune bullshit.”
Kraft smiled ever so slightly, his first display of any emotion other than rage since Max had described his encounter with the group commander. “Not only was the commander being ‘chickenshit,’ but he was also technically incorrect.”
“How? ‘With arms’ was not the UOD on the William Gorgas, and without that additional specification, a sidearm doesn’t go with dress blues.”
“True, XO, but you are forgetting about that.” Kraft pointed to a small, blue ribbon at the left of the top row in Max’s three-row “fruit salad” array of decorations and awards over his right breast. The light blue ribbon with seven tiny white stars arrayed in the shape of an “M,” one star for each of the Orion class gunships of humanity’s first tiny space armada that rode into space on the backs of thermonuclear fireballs that desperate July day in 2034 to take the Moon back from the Ning-Braha and save the human race from slavery or extinction. The ribbon that graced no other chest on board. Except the doctor’s.
“His CMH?”
“Yes, Mr. DeCosta, his Commissioners’ Medal of Honor, an award that is the highest military decoration conferred by the Union and that by statute, regulation, and custom carries with it a fairly lengthy list of privileges.” Kraft lapsed into the tone of voice he tended to use when reciting law and regulations: a tone somewhere between the one used by pastors when citing scripture and the one used by secondary school science teachers when they explain a particularly arcane law of nature.
“Some of these privileges are well known, such as the right to wear the uniform after retirement or discharge whenever one pleases, to stand or march in the first rank of any parade or review of naval personnel in which the recipient participates, a lifelong right to have passage on any naval vessel wherever it may be going, a lifelong right to receive food and lodging at any naval base or station in the galaxy, to meet with one of the Navy’s senators more or less when one wishes, and so on. And some are more obscure. Such as—”
The skipper drew his sidearm from its holster and placed it on the table. “Such as,” he finished for the major, “the right to bear at any time any small arm or edged weapon with which I have personally killed any enemy of the Union. It has to be that actual weapon, mind you, not just the same model.”
He picked up the M-62 10 mm Beretta-Browning pistol and fixed his eyes on it. Every eye in the room followed his. “This qualifies. Many times over.” He reflexively press checked the chamber to be sure it was empty, holstered it, and closed the holster with a loud snap. “Enough of this bitching. Duflot is running this show, and that’s all there is to it. We’re in the Navy. We follow orders. Even stupid ones.” The comm buzzed. Max leaned over to the panel and hit the button. “Skipper.”
“Skipper, this is Chin.”
�
��Go ahead.”
“Sir, I sent that signal you ordered. I positioned the transceiver arrays so that I can guarantee that the pennant got none of the leakage.”
Metaspacial signals had no directionality and could not be traced. But metaspacial transmitters were not perfectly efficient. When they sent a signal, part of the energy was radiated as ordinary electromagnetic radiation, known in the fleet as “leakage,” mostly in the long wave radio band. Chin had made sure that the directionality of the leakage had been away from Duflot’s ship.
“And I’m such a sloppy comms officer there is every chance that the transmission won’t make it into my comm log. Oops. But in case anyone checks the records, they will find that we had not yet logged the order from the pennant imposing EMCON when the signal went out. It took a few minutes longer to log that order than it should have, sir. Oops, again. I suppose we need to do these things with greater celerity in the future.”
“See that you do, Mr. Chin. Be aware that this kind of slapdash, devil-may-care, nonchalant, and…”—he rooted around in the attic of his mind for another suitable adjective—“and lackadaisical attitude toward your duties is not going to be tolerated on my ship. Consider yourself firmly rebuked on that point.” Max almost managed to sound stern. Almost.
“Oh yes, sir. I do, sir. Firmly rebuked, sir. Anything else the comms section can do for you, Captain? Anything at all?”
“No, thank you, Mr. Chin. That’s fine for the present. Skipper out.” In response to the inquiring looks, Max made a dismissive wave of the hand—a wave serving as the signal for “It’s better that you not know right now.”
For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) Page 29