Manticore Ascendant 1: A Call to Duty (eARC)

by David Weber

  “Yes,” Metzger said, thinking furiously. Throwing Long’s name into the hat had been a impulse. Now she needed to come with some logic to back it up. “He’s quite good at his job,” she said. “He’s also quick on his feet in a crisis. There was an EVA accident aboard Vanguard, and he pitched right in with the rescue when one of the gravitics techs got blown off the hull.”

  “I see,” Kiselev said absently as he peered at his display. “Yes, I thought I recognized that name. Did you know he originally started out training as an impeller tech?”

  Metzger frowned. Normally, if a recruit washed out of a specialty, he got dumped into the Bosun’s Mate slot, and that was that. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “What happened?”

  “Not what you’re thinking,” Kiselev said, sounding oddly evasive. “Let’s just say his instructors weren’t happy with him.”

  “With him? Or with his work?”

  “With him personally,” Kiselev said. “That’s really all I can say.” He was silent another moment. “Interesting. I notice that Long has also had a small run-in with another of our proposed Guardian officers. Marine Colonel Jean Massingill, back when she was head of the boot camp section.”

  “So we will be taking some Marines?” Metzger asked. “I assumed we’d save all the rack space for your analysts.”

  “I wish we could,” Kiselev said. “But regs say you have to have at least three Marines aboard for security.” He gestured to his display. “In Massingill’s case, we get a sort of double value. Her husband is a former League yard dog and one of the best ship experts we have. On top of that, the colonel herself has had some disagreements with Locatelli lately, and I get the feeling he’d like to have her out of his sight for awhile.”

  “So sending them both will be a win for everyone.”

  “So it would seem,” Kiselev said. “Interestingly enough, one of her first frictions with the Admiralty was a few years ago, and seems to have been in the wake of her run-in with your same Spacer Long.”

  “Really,” Metzger murmured. Kiselev, Massingill, and Metzger herself, all senior officers with private stories tucked away concerning Spacer Travis Long. Pretty rarefied atmosphere for a lowly spacer who’d been in for such a short time.

  “But that’s all beside the point,” Kiselev continued. “The point was that his false start into impellers means Long has some basic knowledge and training in two different fields. That’s rare for an enlisted of his rate.”

  “Which might make him useful for our purposes,” Metzger pointed out.

  “Agreed,” Kiselev said. “I’ll see what I can do. Anyone else you’d recommend?”

  “Our aft weapons officer, Lieutenant Lisa Donnelly,” Metzger said. If she was going to reward Long for his idea, she might as well go all in and give Donnelly similar points for cutting through the chain of command and bringing him to her attention while there was still time to do something. “I can probably come up with a few more, depending on how many people you want to shuffle around.”

  “We’ll see,” Kiselev said, making a note on his tablet. “So: you, Long, and Donnelly. Okay, I’ll get the ball rolling, and you can expect your orders within the next few weeks.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Metzger said as they both stood and shook hands across the desk. “Thank you.”

  “No thanks needed,” Kiselev assured her. “You’ve earned it.”

  It was only later, as Metzger headed back to Landing for Captain Davison’s knighting ceremony, that she began to have second thoughts about tossing Long’s and Donnelly’s names into this slightly clandestine operation. True, it would give them the rare chance to do a real spaceflight. But if Breakwater got wind of the real purpose of the trip, the two young people would be right there with her and Captain Eigen in the center of the Chancellor’s laser sights.

  Still, for all Breakwater’s legendary volume and bombast, there probably wouldn’t be much he could do to any of them. The worst that could happen would be that they all might be demoted or shunted off to exile on Gryphon for awhile. No, the probable rewards definitely outweighed the possible risks.

  And really, certain parts of Gryphon were said to be quite nice.

  * * *

  Captain Wolfe Guzarwan was halfway through his thick, spice-rubbed steak when a small plastic rectangle came sailing through the open door of Fenris’s wardroom and landed neatly between his plate and his pitcher of margaritas. “What’s this?” he asked, peering down at it.

  “Your invite to the ship sale,” Dhotrumi said, a satisfied grin plastered across his face as he stepped into the wardroom. “A genuine Ueshiba governmental ID card, with all the trimmings.”

  “Genuine, huh?” Guzarwan said. Wiping his fingers on his napkin, he picked up the card and looked more closely. Sandwiched between thin sheets of translucent plastic was a neat array of embedded chips and circuitry. “I thought you said the IDs from that merchantman were too damaged to get anything from.”

  “Vachali said they were too damaged,” Dhotrumi corrected snidely. “But Vachali doesn’t know squat about things that don’t go boom or bang.”

  “I wouldn’t make fun of the colonel’s limited range of expertise if I were you,” Guzarwan warned. “So this will pass as real?”

  “It’ll get you in at the front of the line,” Dhotrumi assured him. If the implied threat of Vachali’s inflated self-importance was worrying him, he was keeping it a dark secret. “’Course, I don’t know if anyone on Secour’s ever even met someone from Ueshiba, let alone scanned one of their IDs.”

  “I’m more worried about the Havenites calling scam than the Secourians,” Guzarwan said.

  “Doesn’t matter who looks at it,” Dhotrumi insisted. “It’ll get you in just fine. Anyway, now that I’ve got the coding I can make more. How many do you want?”

  Guzarwan wiggled the ID slowly between his fingers. “I think this will do.”

  Dhotrumi’s eyes narrowed. “One ID? I thought we were going after the cruiser and the battlecruiser.”

  “We are,” Guzarwan said. “Well, maybe one more. Yes, make it one more ID. Then you can concentrate on working up a few uniforms.”

  “Uniforms,” Dhotrumi said, his voice gone flat. “Let me guess. You’ve changed the plan again.”

  “Our part, yes,” Guzarwan said. “Your part, no. As long as you can crack the Havenite Navy’s start-up procedures, you’re fine. You’ll just follow Vachali and do what he tells you.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Dhotrumi said sourly. “How many uniforms do you want?”

  “Let’s say twenty Republic of Haven Navy and twenty Cascan Defense Force,” Guzarwan said. “Make it a mix of ranks.”

  Dhotrumi blinked. “Twenty Cascan uniforms?”

  “Twenty Cascan uniforms,” Guzarwan confirmed. “You’ve got the specs our clients sent us, right?”

  “Right,” Dhotrumi said uncertainly. “It’s just…Cascan?”

  “Because they’ve also assured me that the Cascans will be at Secour in force,” Guzarwan continued. “Apparently, Haven already has one sale in the box.”

  “I hope it’s not the cruiser,” Dhotrumi muttered.

  “On the contrary,” Guzarwan corrected. “We very much hope it is the cruiser.” He pointed a finger at Dhotrumi. “The only question is whether you think Mota and his team are up to cracking a warship. If they’re not, you’re going to have to do both of them.”

  “Mota will do fine,” Dhotrumi said. “We know from the sale list that the cruiser’s an Améthyste-class, and I’ve got all the back doors for those. Everything else is just access and lockdown codes, and he can handle those.”

  “Assuming the Havenites haven’t found the back doors and cleared them out,” Guzarwan warned.

  Dhotrumi waved a hand. “No problem—they’ll have left a few ghosts behind. People never get everything. Yeah, Mota can handle the cruiser.” His mouth twisted sideways. “The real question is whether Vachali can have Kichloo and his team ready to handle their half of
the boom and bang stuff.”

  “They’ll be ready,” Guzarwan said. “Vachali has enough people to pick from, and they’ve got six more months to train and drill.”

  “Yeah,” Dhotrumi said, not sounding convinced. “I hope that’s enough.”

  Guzarwan eyed him. “You got a problem I should know about?”

  Dhotrumi’s shoulders hunched briefly. “I’m just thinking, Cap’n. Far as I know, no one’s ever tried a stunt like this before. And that was when we were just gonna grab one ship. Now we’re talking two of them.”

  “You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” Guzarwan soothed. On one level, it was ridiculous to have to soothe a pirate. But system hackers like Dhotrumi tended to be nervous types, and Guzarwan had learned over the years that this was the way to calm them down and get them back to their jobs. “Don’t think about the problems. Think about what this score will do for us. With two new warships—”

  “Two used warships.”

  “Two extra warships,” Guzarwan said, feeling his patience starting to thin. Nervous and pedantic; and meanwhile, his steak was getting cold and his margaritas were getting warm. “You just worry about cracking the impeller and command systems. We’ll do the rest.”

  “Yeah,” Dhotrumi muttered. “I just hope the Havenites or Secourians don’t have anything that can chase us. Because I already told you that we’ll never get the weapons up and running in time to be of any use. I told you that, right?”

  “Don’t worry about pursuit,” Guzarwan said. “We’ll have our wedges up before any of the other ships even knows there’s a problem.” He smiled tightly. “You ever see what a wedge does to an unprotected ship?”

  Dhotrumi winced. “No.”

  “I’ll make sure you’re on the bridge for at least one of them,” Guzarwan promised. “It really is a sight to see.”

  “And we’ll do all of them? Haven’s and Secour’s?”

  “And everyone else’s,” Guzarwan promised. “Every last one.”

  He gestured toward the door. “Now if you don’t mind, I have food that needs to be attended to. Get started on that other ID and my forty uniforms. I want them ready before raise the Warshawskis and head for Secour.”

  BOOK THREE

  1533 PD

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Like night and day was one of those figures of speech that Travis had grown up with, along with everybody in the Star Kingdom and probably every human being in the Diaspora. It was pervasive, quoted way too often, and aside from literal night and day he’d long since concluded that the term was hyperbole, a lazy choice of words, or both.

  His life aboard Vanguard had certainly been a long, slow slide into night. With a few exceptions the battlecruiser’s officers and petty officers had seemed placid and coasting, with their priorities more on making life run smoothly than making sure one of His Majesty’s warships stayed as close to fighting trim as possible. The enlisted were even worse, with on-duty hours spent moving at half-speed—or avoiding work altogether—and off-duty ones filled with gambling, stealing or repurposing official ship’s equipment, and engaging in other activities he didn’t even want to think about.

  And drinking. The drinking had particularly rankled. RMN rules put strict limits on the amount of alcohol available aboard, but that never seemed to stop anyone.

  It had often made Travis feel like he was literally under siege on his own ship. He would be at the terminal in his section, trying to study toward his gravitics system operator rating, while drunken shouts and laughter went on outside his door. Every third day, it seemed, he would come upon a job that had been logged as completed, only to find it not only not finished but barely even begun. Reporting it to Craddock or Bowen seldom did any good, and by his third month aboard he’d learned that if he wanted those jobs completed his only practical recourse was to finish them himself.

  And at least twice a day he found himself dodging, kicking, or getting slammed into by cleaning and damage-control remotes that had been rigged for jousting, racing, demolition derbies, or hide-and-seek in the service tubes and accessways. Often in tubes and accessways that should have been cleaned by those selfsame remotes, but clearly hadn’t.

  Esterle’s accident with the gravitic array, and the subsequent halfhearted investigation had set his teeth on edge. The Phobos incident, and the emotional gut-punch of losing the two men who had put themselves on the line to save him from Lieutenant Cyrus’s vendetta, had all but sealed the black sense of frustration and despair that had been gradually settling in around him. It had gone so far that when his half-brother Gavin had come to him after Vanguard’s return to Manticore and asked about the disaster, Travis had told him that as soon as his five T-years were up he would be out.

  It was a thought he’d never before even dared to put into mental words, let alone audible ones, and it was as soul-crushing an admission as anything he’d experienced aboard the ship. It was a statement of defeat, a recognition that the glowing life of Naval service he’d envisioned for himself hadn’t happened.

  He hadn’t fitted into the world of his childhood and youth. Now, it was clear that he didn’t fit into the Navy, either.

  And then, two months after Phobos, he’d been promoted to Petty Officer Third Class and transferred to the destroyer HMS Guardian.

  Night, and day.

  Vanguard’s officers had been soft and lax. Guardian’s officers were tough and demanding. Not in the unthinking, uncaring martinet way that Travis remembered from some of his drill instructors at Casey-Rosewood, but in the make-damn-sure-the-job-gets-done way. More than that, they operated according to the rules and regs, just the way Travis had hoped for when he first joined up. With Guardian’s officers, everyone always knew exactly where they stood and what was expected of them.

  At the same time, running parallel with that theoretically rigid attitude was a carefully tailored flexibility that might almost have been mistaken for laxness. Failures were spotted and the guilty parties properly taken to task, but not every failure made it into the official record. Minor problems arising from ignorance or inexperience were simply corrected, with a stern lecture but no permanent consequences. Only when the lesson failed to take root did the official hammer come down on the perpetrator, with the second lecture often laced with some of the most creative invective Travis had ever heard.

  But in Travis’s experience, that second discipline was seldom needed. As with Vanguard’s enlisted, Guardian’s crew seemed to take their cue from the officers’ standards and attitude. Captain Eigen set the bar high, and his people responded in kind.

  It was a command philosophy that saved Travis’s neck in more ways than one. His promotion to petty officer had put him in official command of the destroyer’s gravitics techs—all two of them—and the casual rule-breaking that had been the norm on Vanguard would have driven him insane with a losing effort to keep order. On Guardian, though, the techs were competent, respectful of authority—even Travis’s—and adhered to the regs well enough that their occasional lapses weren’t too hard to overlook.

  Especially since Travis himself made plenty of mistakes in his first weeks, most of them minor, all of them frustrating. Again, Guardian’s unofficial patience level came to his rescue, as both the Bosun and the lieutenant in charge of the destroyer’s electronics exercised the same tough patience with him that he was learning how to demand from his subordinates. Slowly, under their tutelage, he learned to strike the same delicate balance they did.

  The crew wasn’t composed of robots, of course, and there were still plenty of hijinks during off-duty hours. But again unlike Vanguard, everyone seemed to understand that there were lines they weren’t to cross, and they mostly stayed behind them.

  And as for his efforts toward his gravitics specialist rating…

  * * *

  “There,” Lieutenant Ioanna Kountouriote said, jabbing her slightly crooked forefinger at the center gravitics display. “Did you see it?”

  “Yes, Ma’a
m,” Travis managed, fighting back the sudden bout of nausea that had hammered across him as the ship crossed the Alpha wall back into N-space. He’d experienced this once before, back when Vanguard did her microjump between Manticore-A and Manticore-B, and at the time he’d hoped that the severity of the sickness was at least partially due to the crossing-the-wall hazing he and the other first-timers had also been going through.

  But it was just as bad the second time as it had been the first. At least this time he’d known enough to adjust his meal schedule so that his stomach would be empty, which relieved him of the worry that he was about to flood CIC with yuck.

  Adding to the aggravation was the fact that Kountouriote and the other officers and ratings around him seemed completely unfazed by the experience. He hoped they were just faking it.

  “That was the secondary gravitic ripple coming from the energy bleed off our Warshawski sails as we translated to N-space,” Kountouriote identified the twitch. “It’s pretty small, especially compared to the noise the hyper footprint kicks out, and it’s almost undetectable even from your own ship. But transitionals like that add to your database on how your nodes are doing. All part of the sys op’s job.” She waved at the display again. “Now you know what one of those is supposed to look like.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said, taking a slightly deeper breath as the nausea faded away. “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  Kountouriote grunted. “No problem. Thank the Captain that he likes to see young skulls full of vacuum filled with something more useful than sports scores and card-draw odds.”

  “I would never bother with card odds, Ma’am,” Travis assured her.

  “That’s why you usually lose,” the petty officer two consoles down at the lidar station murmured.

  Travis smiled lopsidedly. Six months ago, back on Vanguard, a comment like that would have dropped him into a pit of frustration and silent anger. Now, he could recognize it as plain simple truth. “Which is why I don’t usually play,” he said.