by David Weber
"We've just more or less agreed that if they want an incident we can't stop them from producing one, Dame Christa," Sarnow pointed out. "If we sit tight and wait to see what they're up to, we're only giving them the advantage of picking their own time and place. But if we pressure them, instead, they may decide the game isn't worth the risk. And if they don't see it that way and decide to push back, we'll be in position to do something about it. It's unlikely they'd actually attack us if we stay on their backs, and if they do, we'll have our full strength massed to cut them off at the knees."
"I'm inclined to agree with Dame Christa," Parks said in a carefully neutral voice. "There's no point helping them rattle their sabers at this point, Admiral Sarnow. Of course, if the situation changes, my view of the proper response will change with it."
He met Sarnow's eyes, and the rear admiral nodded after only the slightest of pauses.
"All right. In that case, Admiral Tyrel," Parks went on, looking at his other battlecruiser commander, "we'll split your squadron. Put two ships at Yorik and three each at Zanzibar and Alizon. Captain Hurston—" he nodded at his operations officer "—will assign appropriate screening elements."
"Yes, Sir." Tyrel looked unhappy, and Parks didn't blame him. Splitting his squadron would not only increase each unit's individual vulnerability but effectively reduce Tyrel from a squadron CO to a divisional commander. On the other hand, it would put a senior officer at Zanzibar, by far the most ticklish of Parks' responsibilities. And, he admitted to himself, it would leave Sarnow's battlecruisers, once they were all assembled, here in Hancock where he could keep an eye on their aggressive CO.
"I think that concludes our business for the morning, then," he said, rising to indicate the end of the conference, and started for the hatch.
It opened as he reached it, and a communications yeoman recoiled as he found himself face-to-face with his admiral.
"Uh, excuse me, Sir Yancey. I have a priority message for Captain Beasley."
Parks waved the yeoman past him, and his staff com officer took the message board from him. She scanned the text, then made an irritated sound through her teeth.
"Problems, Theresa?" Parks asked.
"Perimeter Tracking picked up a new arrival about thirty minutes ago, Sir," Beasley said, and glanced across at Sarnow. "It seems your flagship's arrived, Admiral. Unfortunately, she's not exactly in fighting trim."
She handed the message board to the rear admiral, and went on speaking to Parks.
"Nike's suffered a major engineering casualty, Sir. Her entire after fusion plant's off-line. According to her engineer's preliminary survey, there's a fracture clear through the primary bottle generator housing."
"Something must have gotten past the builder's scans," Sarnow agreed, still reading the message. "It sounds like we're going to have to pull the entire installation."
"Did they suffer any personnel casualties?" Parks demanded.
"No, Sir," Beasley reassured him.
"Well, thank God for that." The admiral sighed, then shook his head with a dry chuckle. "I'd hate to be her skipper about now. Imagine reporting for your first deployment with the Fleet's newest battlecruiser and having to tell your station commander you're reduced to two-thirds power!" He shook his head again. "Who is the unfortunate fellow, anyway?"
"Countess Harrington, Sir," Sarnow said, looking up from the message board.
"Honor Harrington?" Parks asked in surprise. "I thought she was still on medical leave."
"Not according to this, Sir."
"Well, well." Parks rubbed his chin, then looked back at Beasley. "Alert the yard to expedite their detailed survey, Theresa. I don't want that ship out of action any longer than necessary. If it's going to be faster to return her to Hephaestus, I want to know it soonest."
"Yes, Sir. I'll get right on it."
"Thank you." Parks rested his hand on Sarnow's shoulder for a moment. "As for you, Admiral, it would seem your transfer to your new flagship may be a bit delayed. For the moment, I'll hold Irresistible here for you. If Nike has to be sent home, I'm sure the Admiralty will send you a replacement before I have to release Irresistible."
"Thank you, Sir."
Parks nodded and beckoned for his chief of staff to join him as he left the briefing room. Commodore Capra fell in at his right side, and Parks glanced back to be sure they were out of earshot before he sighed.
"Harrington," he murmured. "Now isn't that just peachy?"
"She's an outstanding officer, Sir," Capra replied, and Parks' nostrils flared in a silent snort.
"She's a damned hothead with no self-control is what she is!" Capra said nothing, and Parks grimaced. "Oh, I know all about her combat record," he said testily, "but she ought to be kept on a leash! She did a good job in Basilisk, but she could have been more diplomatic about it. And that business about assaulting an envoy in Yeltsin—"
He shook his head, and Capra bit his tongue. Unlike Parks, the commodore had met The Honorable Reginald Houseman, Ph.D., and he suspected Harrington had let him off far more easily than he deserved. But that wasn't a viewpoint he could expect his admiral to share, and the two of them walked on in silence until Parks suddenly stopped dead and slapped his forehead.
"Oh, Lord! It was Houseman she attacked, wasn't it?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Great. Just wonderful! And now Houseman's cousin is chief of staff for the heavy cruiser element of Sarnow's screen. I can hardly wait for the two of them to meet up!"
Capra nodded without expression, and Parks went on, more to himself than his companion, as they stepped into the lift and he punched their destination code.
"Just what we need." He sighed. "Two fire-eaters, one of them flag captain to the other, and the makings of an instant feud between her and a cruiser squadron's chief of staff!" He shook his head wearily. "Somehow I'm starting to think this is going to be a very long deployment."
CHAPTER SIX
"There, Ma'am," Ivan Ravicz said unhappily "See it?"
Honor studied the scanner display, then tightened her left eye socket to switch to microscopic mode. She bent closer to the housing and grimaced as she finally found it. The tiny, ruler-straight fracture line was almost invisible—even her cybernetic eye had trouble spotting it—but it ran clear across, cutting diagonally from corner to corner and extending almost down to deck level.
"I see it." She sighed. "How did the builder's scans miss it?"
"Because it wasn't there." Ravicz scratched his nose, deep-set eyes more mournful than ever, and gave the generator a disgusted kick. "There's a flaw in the matrix, Skipper. It looks like good old-fashioned crystallization to me, even if that isn't supposed to be possible with the new synth alloys. The actual fracture probably didn't occur until we went to a normal operational cycle."
"I see." Honor readjusted her eye to normal vision and straightened, feeling the gentle pressure of Nimitz's true-hand on her head as he balanced against her movement.
Like Honor's last ship, Nike had three fusion plants, yet her energy requirements were huge compared to a heavy cruiser's. HMS Fearless could have operated on a single plant, but Nike needed at least two, which gave her only one backup. She needed Fusion Three back before she could be considered truly operational, and from the look of things, getting it back was going to take far longer than Honor cared to think about.
Admiral Parks' greeting message had been perfectly correct, but she'd sensed a coolness behind it, and, under the circumstances, she would have loved to blame this on Hephaestus' yard dogs. Deprived of a legitimate human target for his unhappiness, Parks might well decide Nike's captain ought to have known it could happen . . . and taken steps to see that it didn't.
"Well, in that case, I suppose we—"
She broke off and turned her head as boots sounded on the deck plates behind her, and her lips tightened ever so slightly as she saw the man at Mike Henke's side. He was short, the crown of his head just topping Honor's shoulder, but solid and chunky, and his
dark hair, longer than current fashion decreed, was drawn back in a neat ponytail under his black beret. His cuffs bore the same four gold rings as her own, but his collar carried the four gold pips of a junior grade captain, not the single planet of a captain of the list, and Nimitz shifted on her shoulder as he sensed her sudden spurt of associative dislike—and her self-recrimination for feeling it.
"Sorry we're late, Ma'am," Henke said formally. "Captain Tankersley was tied up on another job when we docked."
"No problem, Mike." Honor's soprano was cooler than she would have preferred, but she held out her hand. "Welcome aboard Nike, Captain. I hope you can get her back on-line quickly for us."
"We'll certainly try, Milady."
Tankersley's voice was deeper than she remembered, rumbling about in his chest, and a trickle of someone else's feelings oozed into her brain. It was Nimitz, tapping her into Tankersley's emotions as he'd learned to do since Yeltsin. She was still far from accustomed to his doing that, and she reached up to touch him in a silent injunction to stop. But even as she did, she recognized the matching discomfort in the other captain, a sense of awkward regret over the circumstances of their first meeting.
"Thank you," she said more naturally, and gestured at the scanner. "Commander Ravicz has just been showing me the damage. Take a look, Captain."
Tankersley glanced at the display, then looked again, more closely, and pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
"All the way across?" He cocked an eyebrow and grimaced at Ravicz's doleful nod, then smiled wryly at Honor. "These new alloys will be wonderful things, Milady—once we figure out exactly what we're doing with them."
"Indeed." Honor's lips twitched at his tone, and she tapped the generator. "Am I right in assuming we're looking at complete replacement here?"
"I'm afraid so, Ma'am. Oh, I could try a weld, but we're talking a bead a good twenty meters long just across the outer face. This stuff's not supposed to break in the first place, and according to The Book, patching should only be considered as a last resort. The fracture cuts right through two of the central load-bearing brackets and the number two hydrogen feed channel, too, I'm afraid. Odds are we'd have to pull it anyway, and I'd rather not leave you with a repaired unit that could crap out again without warning. My people can try to patch it once we have it in the shop. If they pull it off—and if it meets specs after they do, which I doubt it will—we can put it in stores for later use. In the meantime, we can get Nike back up and running with a new housing."
"You have one we can swap out?"
"Oh, yes. We're topped up with spares for almost everything." Tankersley's pride in his newly operational base showed, and Honor felt herself thaw even further at his obvious readiness to tackle the job.
"How long are we talking, then?" she asked.
"That's the bad news, Milady," Tankersley said more seriously. "You don't have an access way large enough to move the spare through, so we're going to have to open up the fusion room." He put his hands on his hips and turned slowly, surveying the huge, immaculate compartment, and his eyes were unhappy.
"If Nike were a smaller ship, we could disable the charges and take out the emergency panel, but that won't work here."
Honor nodded in understanding. As in most merchantmen, fusion rooms in destroyers and light cruisers—and some smaller heavy cruisers—were designed with blow-out bulkheads to permit them to jettison malfunctioning reactors as an emergency last resort. But larger warships couldn't do that, unless their designers deliberately made their power plants more vulnerable than they had to. Nike was a kilometer and a half long, with a maximum beam of over two hundred meters, and her fusion plants were buried along the central axis of her hull. That protected them from enemy fire, but it also meant she simply had to hope the failsafes worked in the face of battle damage which did get through to them . . . and that there was no easy access to them from outside.
"We're going to have to go through the armor and a lot of bulkheads, Milady, and then we're going to have to put them all back again," Tankersley went on. "We've got the equipment for it, but I imagine it's going to take at least two months—more probably fourteen or fifteen weeks."
"Could Hephaestus knock that time down if we returned to Manticore?" She kept her tone as neutral as possible, but if Tankersley took any offense at the question it didn't show.
"No, Milady. Oh, Hephaestus has an edge in ancillary equipment, but I doubt they could shave more than a week off our time, and you'd spend twice that long in transit for the round trip."
"I was afraid of that." Honor sighed. "Well, it seems we're in your hands. How soon can we get started?"
"I'll get my own survey people over here within the hour," Tankersley promised. "We're still pretty busy with expansion work, but I think I can juggle my schedules a bit and start clearing away the control runs by next watch. I've got a tin-can in Slip Two with her after impeller ring wide open, and my exterior crews will need another day or so to button her back up. As soon as they're finished, Nike gets top priority."
"Outstanding," Honor said. "If I have to turn my ship over to someone, Captain, I'm glad it's at least someone who gets right to it."
"Oh, I'll certainly do that, Milady!" Tankersley turned back from his study of the bulkheads with a grin. "No mere yard dog wants a starship captain on his neck. Don't worry. We'll have you back up as quickly as possible."
* * *
Admiral Mark Sarnow looked up and touched a stud as the admittance chime sounded.
"Yes?"
"Staff Communications Officer, Sir," his sentry announced, and Sarnow nodded in satisfaction.
"Enter," he said, and smiled as the hatch opened to admit a tall, gangling redhead in a lieutenant commander's uniform. "So, Samuel. May I assume you bear word from the repair base?"
"Yes, Sir." Lieutenant Commander Webster held out a message board. "Captain Tankersley's estimate on Nike's repairs, Sir."
"Ah." Sarnow accepted the board and laid it on his desk. "I'll read it later. Just give me the bad news first."
"It's not all that bad, Sir." Webster's formal expression turned into a smile of his own. "The housing's definitely shot, but Captain Tankersley figures they can have a replacement in place within fourteen weeks."
"Fourteen weeks, eh?" Sarnow rubbed his brushy mustache, green eyes thoughtful. "I hate to have her down that long, but you're right—it is better than I was afraid of." He leaned back, still stroking his moustache, then nodded. "Inform Admiral Parks I think we can allow Irresistible to depart on schedule, Samuel."
"Yes, Sir." Webster braced briefly to attention and started to leave, but Sarnow raised a hand.
"Just a minute, Samuel." The lieutenant commander paused, and the admiral gestured at a chair. "Have a seat."
"Yes, Sir." Webster sank into the indicated chair, and Sarnow let his own swivel slowly back and forth as he frowned down at his desk. Then he looked back up to meet his com officer's eyes.
"You were in Basilisk with Lady Harrington?" His tone made the question a statement, and memory darkened Webster's eyes. One hand rose to his chest, almost by reflex, but he snatched it back down and nodded.
"Yes, Sir. I was."
"Tell me a little about her." Sarnow tipped his chair back and watched the lieutenant commander's face. "Oh I've read her record, but I don't have any sort of real feel for her personality."
"I—" Webster paused and cleared his throat at the unexpected question, and Sarnow waited patiently while he got his thoughts in order. RMN personnel were seldom invited to comment on their seniors—especially their ex-COs—and, as a rule, the admiral disliked officers who encouraged people to do so. But he didn't retract the request. Admiral Parks hadn't actually said anything, yet his reservations about Harrington were obvious in the way he hadn't said it.
Honor Harrington had more command combat experience than any two other officers her age. Nothing in Sarnow's download of her record seemed to justify any admiral's being less than delighted to hav
e a captain of her proven ability under his command, yet Parks obviously was. Was that because he knew something Sarnow didn't? Something that wasn't in her official personnel jacket?
Of course, Parks always had been a nitpicker where military etiquette was concerned. No one could deny his competence, but he could be depressingly prim and proper—in fact, he was a pretty cold damned fish—and Sarnow had heard the gossip about Harrington. He also knew there were always stories, especially about officers who'd achieved what she had; the problem was knowing which were based in fact and which in fancy. What worried him were the ones that suggested she was hotheaded—even arrogant—and he more than suspected it was those same reports that concerned Parks, as well.
He could discount a lot of them as the work of those jealous of her achievements, and the Admiralty would hardly give any officer they had doubts about command of Nike. But there was always the specter of personal influence, and by all accounts, Admiral White Haven had decided to make Harrington's career some sort of personal project. Sarnow knew White Haven, if not well, and his obvious partisanship probably reflected his own belief that Harrington was every bit as good as her record indicated. It was an admiral's job to nurture outstanding junior officers, after all. But, in a way, White Haven's very reputation for refusing to play the influence game for anyone in the past made his present efforts on her behalf just the least bit suspect.
Yet whatever anyone else thought of her, she was now Sarnow's flag captain. He had to know the woman behind the stories, not just the "official" record. For that he needed input from someone who knew her, and Webster was hardly a typical junior officer. Despite his youth, Samuel Webster had probably seen more senior officers, both socially and professionally, than Sarnow had. He'd also been critically wounded under Harrington's command, which should counteract any tendency to idealize her. More than that, he was bright and observant, and Sarnow trusted his judgment.
Webster settled himself deeper in his chair, unaware of Sarnow's thoughts, and wished his admiral hadn't asked him. It felt disloyal to discuss Captain Harrington with her current superior. But he was no longer her com officer; he was Admiral Sarnow's.