by neetha Napew
In fact, the trip back to Sector Headquarters was one of the most depressing of her life. She, like Huron, had itched to blow away some pirates and slavers . . . and yet she’d had to run along home, like an incompetent civilian. She found herself grumbling at Hollister - and it wasn’t his fault.
Her new executive officer seemed even less capable after that short conversation with Huron . . . she knew she criticized him too sharply, but she couldn’t help it. She kept seeing Huron’s face, kept imagining how it would have been to have him there. For distraction, such as it was, she kept digging at the personnel records, looking over every single one which could possibly have had access to the right area of the ship when the missile was fired. After Kelly came Kelland, and from there she plowed through another dozen, all the way to Prosser. Prosser’s ID in his records had an expression she didn’t like, a thin-lipped, self-righteous sort of smirk, and she found herself glaring at it. Too much of this, and she’d come to hate every member of the crew. They couldn’t all be guilty. Prosser didn’t look that bad in person (she made a reason to check casually); it was just the general depression she felt. And she knew she’d face a Board of Inquiry, if not a court martial, back at Sector.
Sector Headquarters meant long sessions with administrative officers who wanted to know exactly how each bit of damage to the ship had occurred, exactly why she’d chosen to do each thing she’d done, why she hadn’t done something else instead. As the senior engineers shook their heads and tut-tutted over the damage, critiquing Hollister’s emergency repairs, Sassinak found herself increasingly tart with her inquisitors. She had, after all, come back with a whole ship and relatively few casualties, and rescued a shipload of youngsters, when she might have been blown into fragments if she’d followed a rigid interpretation of the Rules of Engagement. But the desk-bound investigators could not believe that a cruiser like the Zaid-Dayan might be out-gunned by a “tacky little pirate ship” as one of them put it. Sassinak handed over the data cubes detailing the escort’s profile, and they sniffed and put them aside. Was she sure that the data were accurate?
Furthermore, there was the matter of practically inviting a hostile force to breach her ship and board. “Absolutely irresponsible!” sniffed one commander, whom Sassinak knew from the Directory hadn’t been on a ship in years, and never on one in combat. “Could have been disastrous,” said another. Only one of the Board, a one-legged commander who’d been marooned in coldsleep in a survival pod on his first voyage, asked the kinds of questions Sassinak herself would have asked. The chair of the Board of Inquiry, a two-star admiral, said nothing one way or the other, merely taking notes.
She came out of one session ready to feed them all to the recycling bins, and found Arly waiting for her.
“Now what?” asked Sass.
Arly took her arm. “You need a drink - I can tell. Let’s go to Gino’s before the evening rush.”
“I feel trouble in the air,” said Sass, giving her a hard look. “If you’ve got more bad news, just tell me.”
“Not here - those paperhangers don’t deserve to hear things first. Come on.”
Sassinak followed her, frowning. Arly was rarely pushy, and as far as Sassinak knew avoided dockside bars. Whatever had come unstuck had bothered her, too. Gino’s was the favorite casual place for senior ship officers that season. For a moment, Sassinak considered the change in her taste in bar decor. Ensigns liked tough exotic places that let them feel adventurous and mature; Jigs and ‘Tenants were much the same, although some of them preferred a touch of elegance, a preference that increased with rank. Until, Sassinak had discovered, the senior Lieutenant Commanders and Commanders felt secure enough in their rank to choose more casual, even shabby, places to meet. Such as Gino’s, which had the worn but scrubbed look of the traditional diner. Gino’s also had live, human help to bring drinks and food to the tables, and rumor suggested a live, human cook in the kitchen.
Arly led her to a comer table in the back. Sassinak settled herself with a sigh, and prodded the service pad until its light came on. After they’d ordered, she gave Arly a sidelong look.
“Well?”
“An IFTL message. For you.” Arly handed her the hardcopy slip. Sassinak knew instantly, before she opened it, what it had to be. An IFTL for a captain in refitting? That could only be an official death notice, and she knew only one person who might. . . she unfolded the slip, and glanced at it, trying to read it without really looking at it, as if this magic might protect her from the pain. Official language left the facts bald and clear:
Huron was dead, killed “in the line of duty” while assaulting the pirate base. She blinked back the tears that came to her eyes and gave Arly another look.
“You knew.” It wasn’t a question.
“I... guessed. An IFTL message, after all... why else?”
“Well. He’s dead, I suppose you guessed that, too. Damn fool!” Rage and grief choked her, contending hopelessly in her heart and mind. If only he hadn’t - if only she had - if only some miserable pirate had had a shaky hand . . .
“I’m sorry, Sass. Commander.” Arly stumbled over her name. uncertain. Sassinak dragged herself back to the present.
“He was ... a good man.” It was not enough; it was the worst trite stupid remark, but it was also true. He had been a good man, and being a good man had gotten himself killed, probably unnecessarily, probably very bravely, and she would never see him again. Never feel him again. Sassinak shivered, swallowed, and reached for the drink that had just been delivered. She sipped, swallowed, sipped again. “He wanted to go,” she said, as much to herself as to Arly.
“He was headed for that before you ever got the Zaid-Dayan,” said Arly, surprisingly. Sassinak stared at her, surprised, to be surprised. Arly gulped half her own drink and went on. “I know you ... he ... you two were close. Commander, and that’s fine, but you never did know him before. I served with him six years, and he was good . . . you’re right. He was also wild - a lot wilder before you came aboard, but still wild.”
“Huron?” It was all she could think of to say, to keep Arly talking so that she could slowly come to grips with her own feelings.
Arly nodded. “It’s not in his record, because he was careful, too, in his own way, but he used to get in fights - people would say things, you know, about colonials, and he’d react. Political stuff, a lot of it. He wouldn’t ever have gotten his own ship - he told me that, one time, when he’d been in a row. He’d said too many things about the big families, in the wrong places, for someone with no more backing than he had.”
“But he was a good exec ...” She had trouble thinking of Huron as a hothead causing trouble.
“Oh, he was. He liked you, too, and that helped, although he was pretty upset when you didn’t go in and fight for that colony.”
“Yeah ... he was.” Sassinak let herself remember their painful arguments, his chilly withdrawal.
“I - I thought you ought to know,” said Arly, tracing some design with her finger on the tabletop. “He really did like you, and he’d have wanted you to know . . . it’s nothing you did, to make him insist on going in. He’d have managed, some way, to get into more and more rows until he died. No captain could have been bold enough for him.”
Despite Arly’s well-meant talk, Sassinak found that her grief lasted longer than anyone would approve. She had lost other lovers, casual relationships that had blossomed and withered leaving only a faint perfume . . . and when the lover disappeared, or died, a year or so later, she had felt grief . . . but not like this grief. She could not shake it off; she could not just go on as if Huron had been another casual affair.
She was not even sure why Huron had meant so much. He had been no more handsome or skilled in love, no more intelligent or sensitive than many men she’d shared her time with. When more details of the raid came in, she found that Arly’s guess had been right: Huron had insisted on joining the landing party, had thrown himself into danger in blatant disregard of basic pr
ecautions, and been blown away, instantly and messily, in the assault on the pirate’s headquarters complex. Sassinak overheard what her own crew were too thoughtful to tell her: the troops he’d gone in with considered him half-crazy or a gloryhound, they weren’t sure which. But the more official reports were that he’d distinguished himself with “extreme bravery” and his posthumous rating was “outstanding.” Still, this evidence of his instability didn’t make her feel any better. She should have been able to influence him, in their months together, should have seen something like this coming and headed it off - it was such a waste of talent. She argued with herself, in the long nights, and carefully did not take a consoling drink.
Meanwhile the ship’s repairs neared completion. The environmental system had had to be completely dismantled and refitted, filling the two lower decks with a terrible stench for several days. Apparently the sulfur bacteria had overgrown the backflow sludge, and coupled with the fungal contamination from the down-stream scrubbers created a disgusting mix of smells. Worse than that, the insides of the main lines had become slightly pitted, providing a vast surface for the contaminants to grow on. So every meter of piping had to be replaced, as well as all valves, pumps, scrubbers, and filters.
Hollister still could not tell whether the problems were inherent in the new layout, or had resulted from deliberate sabotage. Attempts to model the failures on computer, and backtrack to a cause, led to six or seven different possible routes to trouble. Two of them would have involved a single component failure very early in the voyage - highly unlikely to be tampering, in Hollister’s opinion. The others required multiple failures, and one clearly favored sabotage, with eight or ten minor mis-adjustments in remote compartments. But which of these was the real sequence of events, no one could now determine. In trying to correct the problems once they developed, Hollister and his most trusted technicians had handled virtually every exposed millimeter of the system.
Sassinak grimaced at Hollister’s presentation. “So you can’t tell me anything solid?”
“No, captain. I think myself sabotage was involved - things could have gone a lot worse, as the simulations show, and someone wanted to save his or her own life - but I can’t prove it. Worse than that, I can’t prevent it happening next time, either. If I request entirely new personnel, who’s to say they’re all loyal? And it needn’t be an engineering specialist, although that’s a good guess. Everyone knows some of the basics of environmental systems: they have to, in case of disaster. An agent could have been provided specialist knowledge, if it comes to that - Fleet’s environmental systems use the same standard components as everyone else’s.”
“What about the other repairs?” Hollister nodded, and brought her up to date on those. The structural damage had required more dismantling of the portside than Sassinak expected; Hollister explained that was nearly always true. But repairs on that were complete, and on the portside pods as well. To his personal satisfaction, mounting the newest issue of pods there meant replacing half the starboard pods to match them ... he had been worried, he confided, that their prolonged FTL flight on unbalanced pods, with the starboard pods taking the strain, might have caused hidden damage in them. None of the stealth gear had taken damage, and all the computer sections out of service had been replaced. It was just the environmental systems holding them up, and he calculated it would be another two weeks before it was done.
Sassinak began to wonder if the Zaid-Dayan would still be in refitting when Verstan’s battle group returned with Huron’s body. By now everyone had seen reports of the successful assault on the pirate base, holos of shattered domes and blasted prefab buildings. Sassinak stared at them, wondering if the base where she’d lived for her years as a slave had looked anything like this. At least her action had saved those children from being imprisoned in those domes. She visited the hospital once or twice, chatting with youngsters who were now orphans, as she had been. They were less damaged psychologically, if “less” meant anything. Looking at some of them, mute anguished survivors of inexplicable disaster, she almost cursed herself for not intervening before the colony was raided. But some had already bounced back, and some had relatives already coming to take them into known families.
The Board of Inquiry wound down, and turned in a preliminary report - subject to further analysis, the chair explained to her. She was commended for saving the children from the colony, and mildly scolded for not having saved the colony itself - although a dissenting comment argued that any such attempt would have been an unnecessary and reckless risk to her ship. She was commended for the outcome of the battle, but not for the methods she’d chosen. Entirely too risky, and not a good example for other commanders - but effective, and perhaps justified by circumstances. The structural damage to the Zaid-Dayan certainly resulted from her decision to allow the enemy too close, but the environmental system damage might well have been sabotage, or
simply bad engineering in the first place. They approved of her handling of the suspected poisoner: “a deft manipulation of a politically explosive situation.” Sassinak thought of the girl, now in the hands of the psychiatric ward of the Sector military hospital - could she ever be rehabilitated? Could she ever find a way to respect herself? Fleet wouldn’t take another chance on her, that was certain. On the whole, the Board chair said, recapturing her full attention, they found that she had acted in the best interests of the service, although they could not give an unqualified approval.
Under the circumstances, that was the best she could hope for. Admiral Vannoy, Sector Commandant, would make his own decision about how this Board report would affect her future. She had worked with him several years before, and expected better from him than from the Board. He liked officers with initiative and boldness. Sure enough, when he called her in, he waved the report at her, then slapped it on his desk.
“The vultures gathered, eh?”
Sassinak cocked her head a little. “I think they were fair,” she said.
“Within their limits, I hear under your words. So they were - some Boards would have landed on you a lot harder for coming in with damage like that. And for having a Fleet distress beacon telling the universe that a Fleet cruiser had bumped its nose on something painful. Bad for our reputation. But I’m satisfied: you got back a load of kids - frightened out of their wits, some of them hurt, but still alive and free. And you defeated one of their little surprise packages - which, by the way, have caused more than one cruiser to come to grief. You’re the first survivor to come out with a good profile of them and the specifics of their faked IFF signals: that’s worth all the rest, to my mind. And then you managed to stick tight, undiscovered, and pick up quite a bit of useful information. Now we know how well the stealth technologies work in real life. All in all, I’m pleased, Commander, as you probably expected. After all - you know my prejudices. We’re going to put you back out on the same kind of patrol, in another part of the sector, and hope you catch another odd fish.”
“Sir, there is one thing - “
“Yes?”
“I’d like to have more options free in case of another encounter.”
“Such as?”
“Last time my orders specified that surveillance was my primary mission - and on that basis, I did nothing when the colony was attacked. My crew and I both had problems with that . . . and I’d like to be free to act if we should face another such situation.”
The admiral’s eyes fell. “Commander, you have an excellent record, but isn’t it possible that in this case your own experience is affecting your judgment? We’ve tried direct, immediate confrontation before, and repeatedly the perpetrators, or some of them, have been able to escape, and strike again. Tracking them to their source must be more important - “
“In the long term, yes, sir. But for the people who die, who are orphaned or enslaved - have you been to the hospital, sir, and talked to any of the kids Huron brought in?”
“Well, no ... no, I haven’t.”
“All t
hey want to know is why Fleet couldn’t prevent the attack - why their parents died - and what’s going to happen to them now. And it’s not just my own feeling, sir. Lieutenant Commander Huron, my exec, was very upset about my decision not to intervene - and, as you know, he insisted on joining the attack force, and then the landing party, and he died. Other officers and crew have expressed the same feelings - “
“Openly? To you?” Sassinak could tell he did not entirely approve of such openness.
She nodded. “Some of them. Others in conversations I overheard. They don’t like to think of themselves - of Fleet - as standing by idly, in safety, while helpless civilians get killed and captured.”
“I see. Hmm. I still feel. Commander, that surveillance must be your primary mission, but under the circumstances . . . and considering your crew’s most recent experience . . . yes, if you find it absolutely necessary to engage a hostile force, to save innocent lives . . . yes. And I’ll amend your orders to make that discretion explicit.” He looked closely at her. “But I’m not going to take kindly to any shoot-‘em-up action you get into that’s not absolutely necessary, is that clear? You’ve damn near bankrupted our sector repair budget for the next eighteen standard months, with that bucket of bent bolts you brought into the yard, so take better care of it. And call for help if you need it - don’t wait until you’re shot to pieces.”
“Yes, sir!” She left his office with a lighter heart. No, she would not get into an unnecessary fight - but she wouldn’t have to go through the misery of standing by while others suffered, either.
In the meantime, she would be busy checking in additional crew. Some were those who had been assigned to the prize vessel, but had not gone back out with the battle group. Others were newly assigned to replace casualties or transfers out.