Beginnings-eARC

by David Weber

  “It'll be ready by the time you return from your training run, Sir,” Castillo promised.

  “Good,” Locatelli said briskly. “Carry on.” He reached somewhere off-camera, and his image vanished.

  “Secure from Readiness One,” Castillo ordered. “Resume course to Manticore, and get the spin section back up to speed.”

  He turned back to Travis. “First lesson of combat, Mr. Long: always be ready for the unexpected. In this case, because we weren't accelerating and were on a fairly predictable course, Invincible was able to slip a second missile into the wedge shadow of the first. If the attacker is very clever with his timing, he can arrange it so that the rear missile burns out its wedge at the same time the forward one impacts the target's wedge. With nothing showing, a pitched target will have just enough time to resume attitude as the second missile enters kill range.”

  “Sometimes the tell is a bit of the second wedge peeking through during the drive,” Commander Sladek added. “Or it can show up as a sluggishness in the first missile's maneuvering as its telemetry control is eclipsed by the one behind it.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. And if the missile was kicked out with a fusion booster there would also be a telltale flare when it was launched, as well as a slight decrease in the attacking ship's acceleration to give the missile time to get a safe distance before lighting up its wedge. All of that had been in his tactics classes back at Officer Candidate School, he belatedly remembered. In the heat of the moment, and with the role of command unexpectedly thrust upon him—

  He cut off the train of thought. Rather, the train of excuses. He'd been given a job, and he'd failed. Pure and simple.

  And if it hadn't been an exercise, with a practice missile instead of the real thing, he and everyone aboard Phoenix would probably be dead. “Yes, Sir,” he said again. “I'm sorry, Sir.”

  Castillo grunted as he unstrapped from his station. “No need to be sorry, Lieutenant. There's just a need to learn.” He waved at the tac display. “As I said, that kind of trick takes careful timing and a great deal of skill. But it also requires a fair amount of luck. Your job as an officer of the RMN is to cultivate both. And to always assume that your opponent has done likewise.”

  He floated out of his chair, steadied himself a moment, then gave himself a shove that sent him floating swiftly across the bridge. “Mr. Sladek, return ship to Readiness Five,” he called over his shoulder. “Mr. Travis, you may return to your station for debriefing.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. Lesson delivered, and lesson learned, and the captain was back to business as usual.

  Travis would remember the day's lesson, he promised himself. Very, very well.

  * * *

  For the next two days Travis walked around on figurative eggshells, waiting for the inevitable fallout from his part in the fiasco.

  To his surprise, no such fallout materialized. Or at least nothing materialized in his direction. There were vague rumors that Captain Castillo was spending an unusual amount of time in his cabin on the com with System Command, but no details were forthcoming and Travis himself was never summoned into his presence. Given that Phoenix was about to settle in for some serious refitting, chances were good that that was the main topic of any such extended communications.

  Phoenix was slipping into its designated slot in Manticore orbit, and Travis was finally starting to breathe easy again, when the shoe finally dropped.

  * * *

  “You're joking,” Fornier said, staring wide-eyed from across the cabin. “After all that, you're being promoted?”

  “I'm being transferred,” Travis corrected sourly. “I never said it was a promotion.”

  “Please,” Fornier said dryly. “If Casey isn't a promotion, what the hell is it?”

  “I don't know,” Travis growled as he arranged his dress uniform tunic carefully at the top of his travelbag. “But if Locatelli's behind it, hell may very well be the relevant neighborhood.”

  Fornier shook his head. “You're way too young to be this cynical,” he said. “Anyway, who says Locatelli's hand is anywhere near this? For all you know it was Castillo who recommended you for Casey's assistant tac officer slot.”

  “With my sterling performance on the bridge during that drill cementing it?” Travis snorted. “Not likely.”

  “Fine,” Fornier said, clearly starting to lose his wedge-class patience level. “So maybe Castillo decided you needed a lesson in humility. Welcome to the human race. But maybe while he was delivering the message he also saw something he liked about you, some potential that hadn't come through before.”

  “I doubt it,” Travis said. “About all I did was regurgitate what was in the manual. Or half of what was in the manual. No, given Heissman's reputation, I think they all just want me out from under Castillo's fatherly care and underneath a genuine hammer for awhile.”

  For a moment Fornier was silent. Travis looked around the cabin, mentally counting out the items he'd already packed and trying to figure out if he'd missed anything.

  “There are two ways to approach life, Travis,” Fornier said into his thoughts. “One: you can expect that everyone's out to get you, and be alert and ready for trouble at every turn. Or two: you can assume that most people are friendly or at least neutral, and that most of the time things will work out.”

  “Seems to me option two is an invitation to get walked on.”

  “Oh, I never said you don't need to be ready for trouble.” Fornier grinned suddenly. “Hey, we're RMN officers. It's our job to be ready for trouble. I'm just saying that if you're always expecting that second shoe to drop, you're never going to be really able to trust anyone.” He shrugged. “And speaking from my own experience, there are a fair number of people out there who are worth your trust. Not all of them. But enough.”

  “Maybe,” Travis said, sealing his travelbag and picking it up. “I'll take it under advisement.” He held out his hand. “It's been great serving and rooming with you, Brad. Keep in touch, okay?”

  “Will do,” Fornier promised, grasping Travis's hand in a firm grip and shaking it. “Best of luck.”

  II

  “Hyper footprint,” Captain Ngo announced. “From insertion vector, probably Hosney.”

  Llyn nodded, peering at the display. About time. The bulk of the Volsung task force had been sitting in this uninhabited red-dwarf star system for the past two weeks, with only one of the battlecruisers still absent, and Gensonne was starting to get twitchy. The fresh data McConnovitch was bringing in from Manticore should allay the admiral's lingering concerns about the particulars of the force he would be facing. “Any transmissions yet?”

  “No, sir,” Ngo said, an edge of strained patience in his tone. “It is still a light minute away.”

  “I wasn't asking about him,” Llyn countered. “Gensonne's bi-hourly nagging call is almost due, and he'll have picked up Hosney's footprint, too.”

  “No, sir, no transmissions from anywhere.”

  That silence wouldn't last long, Llyn knew. McConnovitch was a good man, and one of the best data scavengers in the business. But Gensonne didn't care about such things. He had his own ideas of how the universe was supposed to operate, and McConnovitch hadn't kept to that schedule, and the admiral hadn't been shy about sharing his view of such sloppiness with Llyn on a regular basis.

  But all that was finally about to come to an end. Once McConnovitch confirmed the RMN's weakness, Llyn could turn the Volsungs loose and then head over to where his Axelrod superiors were waiting to hear that the operation was finally underway. By the time Gensonne had Landing and the Manticoran government under control, Axelrod's people would be on their way to take over.

  “Transmission,” Ngo called. “Incoming data packet from Hosney.”

  Llyn felt a prickling on the back of his neck. No greeting, no identification, just the data packet? That didn't sound like McConnovitch.

  The report came up on his display. Frowning, Lynn began to read.

&
nbsp; And as he did so, the prickling on his neck turned into a shiver.

  Green Force One, scout unit: four ships.

  Green Force Two, main Manticore/Sphinx defense unit: nine ships, including two battlecruisers. Not one, but two.

  Red Force, Gryphon defense unit: four ships, including another battlecruiser.

  The ten-ship, one-battlecruiser enemy that Gensonne was expecting to meet was in fact seventeen ships and no fewer than three battlecruisers. And that didn't even count the three battlecruisers and six other warships that were currently in refit.

  Gensonne wasn't going to be happy about this. Not at all. In fact, he might be unhappy enough to take his ball and go home.

  And given the unanticipated uptick in the RMN's numbers, the contract Llyn and Gensonne had signed not only allowed the Volsungs to bail, but also required Axelrod to pay them a hefty cancellation fee.

  There was no way Llyn was going to let that happen. Not after coming this far. Taking a cleansing breath, he began combing methodically through the numbers.

  It wasn't that bad. Not really. Green Forces One and Two were a formidable array, but the fact that they were split into two groups meant that Gensonne should be able to take them on one at a time. Even if he couldn't, it was still two RMN battlecruisers against the Volsungs' three. Even better, Red Force was way the hell over at Manticore-B and should be out of the picture until long after the battle was over. And of course, all the ships in dock for refit might as well not even be there.

  No, Gensonne wasn't going up against anything he couldn't handle. Not with his three battlecruisers, his fourteen other ships, and his massive confidence.

  There was certainly no reason to bother the admiral's little head with silly numbers and needless concerns.

  He had finished editing McConnovitch's report when Gensonne finally called in. “Yes, Admiral, I've just decoded it,” Llyn told him calmly. “I'm sending it to you now.”

  “Thank you,” Gensonne said. “I trust nothing has changed since your last report?”

  “Nothing of significance,” Llyn assured him. “Nothing at all.”

  * * *

  Commodore Rudolph Heissman, commander of the light cruiser HMS Casey and the other three ships of Green Two, the task force callsigned Janus, was undoubtedly a very busy man. Nevertheless, from Travis's point of view at the far side of Heissman's desk, it looked like he was taking an extraordinarily long time to read through Travis's transfer orders. Seated beside him, Commander Celia Belokas, Heissman's exec, didn't look to be in any more of a hurry than her boss.

  Finally, after a mid-size eternity, Heissman looked up. “Lieutenant Long,” he said, his flat tone not giving anything away. “According to this, you have great potential.”

  He paused, as if expecting some kind of response. “Thank you, Sir,” was all Travis could think to say. The words, which had sounded tolerably reasonable in his head, sounded excruciatingly stupid when he heard them out in the open air.

  Heissman apparently thought so, too. “You know what I hear when someone uses the phrase great potential, Mr. Long?” he asked, his expression not changing in the slightest. “I hear someone making excuses. I hear someone who hasn't worked to reach the level of his or her ability. I hear someone who doesn't belong in the Royal Manticoran Navy. I hear someone who absolutely doesn't belong aboard HMS Casey.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. That response didn't sound any better than the previous one had.

  “I don't want to see potential,” Heissman continued. “I want to see results.” He cocked his head. “Do you know what a tac officer's job is, Mr. Long?”

  “Yes, Sir.” The words sounded marginally better this time. “To assist the captain in combat maneuvers and—”

  “That's the job description,” Heissman interrupted. “What a tac officer does is find patterns and weaknesses in the enemy, and avoid them in his own ship.”

  He gazed into Travis's eyes, his expression hardening. “Captain Castillo talks a lot about luck. I don't ever want to hear you use that word aboard my ship. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said.

  “Good,” Heissman said. “As I said, part of your job is to know the weaknesses of your own ship and find ways to minimize them. Step one in that procedure is obviously to know your ship.” He nodded to his side. “In light of that, Commander Belokas has graciously agreed to give you a tour. Pay attention and listen to everything she has to say. Afterward, you're going to need a lot of hours with the spec manual before you're anywhere near up to speed.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said. He shifted his eyes to Belokas. “Ma'am.”

  Heissman's eyebrows rose a fraction of a centimeter. “Unless, of course, you've already spent some time in the manual,” the commodore continued, as if the thought had only just occurred to him. “Have you?”

  “As a matter of fact, Sir, yes, I have,” Travis confirmed, trying not to grimace. He'd only spent eighty percent of his waking hours during his two weeks of groundside time poring through everything he could find on Casey and her equipment. Which, considering all the bureaucratic hoops he'd had to jump through to even get the manuals, Heissman almost certainly already knew. “Just the surface information, of course—”

  “In that case, you can give the tour,” Heissman said. “You'll tell Commander Belokas everything you know, and she'll start on her list of everything you don't know. That sound fair to you?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Travis said.

  “Good,” Heissman said. “You have two hours before you're to report to Lieutenant Commander Woodburn, so you'd better get to it.” He nodded briskly and lowered his eyes to the report. “Dismissed.”

  III

  “Admiral Gensonne?”

  His eyes and attention still on Llyn's report, Gensonne reached over and keyed the com. “What is it, Imbar?”

  “Hyper footprint, Sir,” Captain Sweeney Imbar, commander of Odin, reported. “Looks like Tyr has finally arrived.”

  Gensonne grunted. About fraggy time. They'd been waiting on Blakely to get his butt here for four solid weeks, and the rest of the captains were getting antsy. Now, with the last of Gensonne's three battlecruisers on site, they were finally ready to get this operation underway. “Send Captain Blakely my compliments,” he instructed Imbar, “and tell him to haul his sorry carcass in pronto so he can start loading supplies and armaments. We head for Manticore in five days, and if he's not ready he'll be left behind.”

  “Aye, Admiral,” Imbar said, and Gensonne could visualize the other's malicious grin. Imbar loved relaying that kind of order.

  Gensonne keyed off the com, and with a scowl returned his attention to Llyn's report.

  Seventeen warships. That was what the Volsung Mercenaries were bringing to the field: three battlecruisers, six cruisers, seven destroyers, and one troop carrier. The Manticorans, in contrast, had only thirteen warships with which to counter the attack.

  Well, seventeen, really, if you wanted to be technical and add in the group guarding Gryphon. But they were way the hell over at Manticore-B. If the Volsungs did their job properly, that force could be left out of the equation. Llyn's spies hadn't been able to get a complete reading on the ship types in each of the two Manticore-A groups, but the earlier report had said the larger force had a single battlecruiser, and there was nothing in this latest intel to suggest that number had changed. The additional ships in the new intel had to be small, destroyers or corvettes.

  Plus the fact that all the enthusiasm in the galaxy could mount impeller rings and graduate crewmen only so quickly. Even if Llyn's current count was off by a ship or two, the Volsungs should be facing no more than the same number of ships they themselves were bringing to the battle.

  Still . . .

  Gensonne murmured a ruminative curse. The wild card in this whole thing, and a wild card that Llyn either hadn't noticed or had deliberately downplayed, was this damn HMS Casey. The tables listed it as a standard light cruiser, but it was clear from
the specs Llyn's spies had been able to dig out that there wasn't anything standard about it, certainly not for ships out here in the hinterlands. From the profile alone, he could see that the Manticorans had put in a modern grav plate habitation module, a high-efficiency radiator system, and had extended the length of their missile launchers. Possibly a railgun launch system; more likely just an absorption cylinder that would minimize the missiles' launch flares. Nothing really revolutionary, and nothing Gensonne couldn't handle.

  Still, it was far more advanced than it should be, and better than most of the Volsungs' own mainly second-hand and surplused ships. The report didn't get into details about armament or defenses, but Gensonne had no doubt that Casey's designers hadn't neglected to pack some serious firepower aboard.

  And if King Edward had had the authority, the confidence, and the cash to turn his designers loose on Casey, he might well have used that same combination to speed up the de-mothballing of those other ships.

  The smart thing would be to put off the operation until Gensonne had time to send his own people to Manticore. Get a real military assessment instead of having to rely on Llyn's paper-pushing guesswork. But getting a civilian spy ship way out there and back again with anything useful would take over a year, and Llyn wanted this done now.

  Gensonne scowled. The ongoing mystery underlying this whole thing was what in blazes the Manticorans could possibly have that was worth this much effort. Llyn was paying the Volsungs a huge sum of money to take over three lumps of real estate on the bloody back end of nowhere. Gensonne had tried on numerous occasions to wangle that secret out of the smug little man, and every time Llyn had calmly and artfully dodged the question.

  But that was all right. The Volsung Mercenaries weren't without resources of their own . . .and if Gensonne still didn't know the why, he now at least knew the who.

  Llyn's employer, the man quietly funding this whole operation, was one of the top people in the multi-trillion, transstellar business juggernaut known as the Axelrod Corporation.