Vanguard (Ark Royal Book 7)

by Christopher Nuttall

  Susan rather doubted it. The Old Boys Network was good - very good - at making sure that most promotions went to those with the correct connections, but it was dominated by serving officers who understood the stakes. A decent officer would get a boost, true, yet a well-connected officer without competence would be pushed into a cushy desk job rather than being allowed to take command of a starship. The near-incident on the bridge only illustrated the wisdom of that policy. One disaster ran the risk of tearing the Old Boys Network apart.

  It isn't enough to make sure that the right people get the right jobs, she thought, with a twinge of the old bitterness. They have to be the right people for the right jobs.

  “Maybe,” she said. “But they’d be taking one hell of a risk.”

  “They might not know,” Mason pointed out. “Officially, there are no question marks in the captain’s file.”

  Susan eyed him. “You’ve been studying the file too.”

  “Yeah,” Mason said. “And unless there are aspects sealed away above my clearance, Commander, there’s no reason to doubt that Captain Blake can handle his post.”

  Susan stared down at her coffee. “If there was an accident ... I mean, something that happened to him.”

  Mason looked relieved. “I thought you were considering arranging an accident for him.”

  “I think the Admiralty would not be amused,” Susan said, dryly. Captains had died before, in accidents, but they’d always been carefully investigated. Anyone who attempted to assassinate a commanding officer would wind up hung. “Even if he is a potential danger.”

  She cleared her throat. “If something happened to him, over the last decade, wouldn't it have been noticed?”

  “There’s no accident recorded in his file,” Mason said. “And the only time he was in sickbay for anything more than a routine check-up was when he was badly scalded as a young officer, back during the war. There wasn't anything more to the incident.”

  “And he just got put back to work,” Susan said.

  She frowned. Back when she’d been roped into rebuilding work on Earth, she’d read a paper by a noted psychologist predicting that the human race would recover quicker than anyone expected, despite the lack of psychiatric help. Susan had found the paper rather amusing - civilian psychologists had never struck her as anything more than money-grubbing hypocrites - but the author had had a point. It was hard to believe that there was something uniquely terrible about losing one’s home and family to rising floodwaters when hundreds of thousands of other people were in the same boat. These days, no one wasted thousands of pounds on expensive mental treatment. They just got back to work.

  “I’ve been injured too, in combat,” Mason pointed out. “It didn’t do me any harm.”

  “It didn’t do you any harm,” Susan repeated, sarcastically. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes,” Mason said. “I may have spent three months in a hospital on the moon, but there were some really cute nurses and a doctor who had an enormous ...”

  “I don’t want to know,” Susan said, quickly. Given how often Mason had visited Sin City, while they'd been at the academy, she was surprised he’d done as well as he had on his exams. “And I'm sure that wasn't on the approved list of treatments.”

  “It should be,” Mason said. “Do you know one of the nurses used to ...”

  “No,” Susan said. She was no prude, but she’d heard enough exaggerated stories of sexual conquests during her time as a midshipwoman to take them all with a grain of salt. Besides, she hadn't been able to fund trips to Sin City for herself. “And I don’t want to know either.”

  Mason shrugged. “So,” he said. “What are we going to do?”

  “You’re not going to do anything, beyond keeping copies of my notes,” Susan said. It was heartening to realise that Mason was prepared to risk his own career to help her, but she wasn't about to let him throw away his prospects for nothing. “I’ll keep an eye on him and stay on the bridge as much as possible.”

  “He does seem willing to let you handle everything,” Mason noted. “Has he actually been on the bridge since the ... incident?”

  Susan shook her head. As XO, it was her job to organise the duty rosters for bridge crew, but by long-standing tradition the captain had the right to choose whatever shift he liked. Somewhat to her surprise, although not entirely to her dismay, Captain Blake hadn't chosen any duty shift for himself. She’d organised a rotating shift consisting of herself, Mason, Reed and Parkinson, but she had no idea what the captain had in mind. Ironically, she knew she would have been relieved if the captain had openly stated he wouldn't be taking shifts when the ship wasn't actually heading into a combat situation.

  “Maybe you could just claim the role by default,” Mason said. “How long would you need to be an acting captain before they had to promote you anyway?”

  “There’s no fixed limit,” Susan said. In theory, anyone could be promoted to any rank, as long as it was an acting rank, but in practice it was rare for any such rank to be automatically confirmed. “I could be the effective commanding officer for years and still not automatically succeed Captain Blake.”

  “Something has to be done,” Mason said. “We’re heading out for war games, remember, with Admiral Boskone in command. I wouldn’t put good money on him not noticing Captain Blake’s ... issues. He’d go through the roof.”

  Susan nodded, curtly. She’d heard of Admiral Boskone. He’d been a Commodore during the Anglo-Indian War, then promoted to serve as commanding officer of the border guards for two years. He had a reputation for being a sharp-tongued bastard, although no one doubted his tactical skill. She rather doubted he would be pleased if the Royal Navy lost the war games because of Vanguard’s commanding officer.

  “Maybe I should speak to him bluntly,” she mused.

  Mason looked up. “Admiral Boskone?”

  “Captain Blake,” Susan corrected. She looked down at her mug and scowled. “Tell him that he needs to buck up before Admiral Boskone takes a good hard look at his records.”

  “It would cost you your career,” Mason said, bluntly. “Never make a weak man look small, Susan. He’ll never forgive you for it.”

  Susan sighed. The relationship between captain and XO had been laid down for centuries, ever since the days when the Royal Navy had been messing around in boats instead of flying starships. An XO was supposed to be the captain’s alter ego, watching his back, taking as much of the day-to-day burdens off his shoulders ... and, when asked, providing uninhibited commentary and advice. Her superior officer on Cornwall had never contradicted the captain in public, but she’d heard him disagree - sometimes quite loudly - with the commanding officer in private. And his career had never been harmed. He’d been earmarked for CO of a cruiser when Susan had left the ship for the final time.

  Of course, she thought, a commanding officer is supposed to have been an XO. He’d understand what the job entailed, even if he didn't like being contradicted in private.

  She scowled. “So what do I tell him?”

  Mason met her eyes. “You can't tell him he’s being an ass, because that could cost you everything,” he said. “A simple comment in the margins of your personal report would be enough to damn you to Rockall. And you can’t report him because that would probably be enough to damn your career anyway. The captain’s connections will bring you down, unless you make a secretive approach and that could easily backfire. All you can really do is wait until he crosses the line, then hope you can relieve him before he causes a real disaster.”

  Susan glared at him. “You mean like nearly blowing an innocent courier boat out of space?”

  “It may not have been entirely innocent,” Mason pointed out. “She vanished shortly after we passed through the tramline.”

  “Maybe,” Susan said, doubtfully. “But even if she was crammed to the gills with reporters, it wouldn't justify blowing her out of space.”

  She looked down at her hands. There was no reason for the courier boa
t to shadow Vanguard and her escorts all the way to the tramline, not when the courier could easily have given the warships a wide berth. No, it suggested that the courier and her crew were interested in the battleship itself, which was worrying. And yet, they could learn nothing through optical examinations of the ship’s hull, certainly nothing that wasn't already public. She’d been careful to monitor off-ship traffic, but there had been nothing save for their final transmission before entering the tramline.

  “All we can do is wait, then,” she said. She stood and poured herself a second mug of black coffee. “What do you make of the new midshipmen?”

  “Reasonably capable,” Mason said. “Not a patch on us, of course.”

  “Of course,” Susan agreed.

  Mason smiled. “Fitzwilliam has a good head on her shoulders for tactical problems, it seems,” he added. “Asks good questions, never makes the same mistake twice ... Bosworth asked about one of the unpredictable tests and seemed a little put out when I told him it was meant to help him prepare for the unexpected, not what we knew we’d be facing.”

  “It does tend to catch people by surprise,” Susan agreed. “I fought a ship that was protected by forcefields and carried long-range energy weapons.”

  She smiled at the memory, although it had been embarrassing at the time. An outside-context enemy would be a complete surprise, she’d been told; the real purpose of the test was to see how quickly she reacted to an unexpected threat, rather than something she understood and trained to face. Forcefields were the stuff of science-fantasy, like jumping through space without tramlines or sending messages at FTL speeds, even though the boffins kept claiming that they should be possible. But no one had produced a working forcefield, let alone a portable tramline generator. She wouldn't hold her breath waiting to see one.

  “Yeah,” Mason said. “I won ten pounds on that battle.”

  Susan gave him a cross look. “I won fifteen on yours.”

  “No wonder you were buying the drinks that night,” Mason said, wryly.

  “Back to the subject at hand,” Susan said, “do you anticipate any major problems?”

  “With our two new midshipmen?” Mason shrugged, then allowed his voice to become more formal. “They’ve got a lot of baby fat to lose, Commander, and much of what they learned at the academy hasn't prepared them for the reality of shipboard life. But they’re good kids and have a reasonable chance of actually mastering their responsibilities before we go back to war.”

  Susan looked at him. “Do you think we’re going to be fighting another war?”

  “Humans are always fighting wars,” Mason said. “The Indians are probably still smarting over the thrashing we gave them, while the Russians are brooding and the minor powers are plotting their own advance into space. And then there’re the Tadpoles. They might decide to restart the war at a moment’s notice.”

  “I hope you’re being paranoid,” Susan said.

  “Maybe,” Mason said. “But you have noticed that the government has been pouring one-third of our total revenue into the navy and shipbuilding? I don’t think we were spending so much on the military during the Troubles, when we were fighting for our survival. Even now, ten years after the last war, they’re still building up the fleet. Someone expects trouble.”

  He paused. “Not that I’m complaining,” he added. “The more starships in active service, the greater the chance for a command of my own.”

  “I can understand that,” Susan said. “I feel the same way too. A command of my own ... that would be a dream come true.”

  She finished her second mug of coffee, then rose. “If you don’t mind, I have to be on the bridge in two hours ...”

  “... And you want a catnap,” Mason finished. He rose, putting the mug down on the table as he walked towards the door. “I’ll speak to you soon, all right? You’re not alone here.”

  “As long as the captain doesn’t know it,” Susan said. She met his eyes for a long moment, trying to convey her message. “There’s no point in both of us going down in flames.”

  Chapter Ten

  “You know,” Nathan commented, as he looked around the tiny compartment, “this looks like a prison.”

  George said nothing. She was too nervous to speak. Fraser’s hints of what was coming worried her, even though - so far - all that had happened was that they’d been pushed into a small compartment and told to wait while the older midshipmen prepared for the initiation. It was unlikely either of them would be physically hurt - the navy took a dim view of midshipmen hurting themselves while they were meant to be on duty - but she had a nasty feeling that they were in for some humiliation. She’d tried looking up initiation rites in the files, only to discover that each ship had its own. There had been nothing on what might be lying in wait for them.

  “It won’t kill us,” Nathan said. He was trying to be reassuring, George realised. “I’m sure it won’t hurt, either.”

  “Hah,” George said. The files had suggested that initiation rites brought crews closer together, but they’d also stated that some crews had crossed the line. Would Fraser? She knew he disliked her, purely because of her name. “I bet you it’ll be humiliating.”

  “Fraser will have survived his own,” Nathan said. “I’m sure he wouldn't repeat something that almost killed him.”

  George snorted. Back at the academy, senior cadets had hazed junior cadets, insisting that they’d been treated in the same way when they’d been junior cadets. But there, the academy staff had kept it under firm control, ensuring that it didn't go too far. Here, on Vanguard, the person who was meant to supervise was Fraser. And he was clearly not inclined to be nice.

  “We shall see,” she muttered. The tension in her stomach had only grown worse. “And if we don’t survive?”

  “I’m sure they’ll give us a decent funeral,” Nathan said.

  George gave him a one-fingered gesture. Someone dying during an initiation rite - a hazing, in less polite terms - would be a major scandal, but was Fraser too far gone to realise it? He would have to be insane to actually risk their lives, yet he might well believe they could cope with more than they could. After all, he’d been a midshipman for over five years. They’d barely been midshipmen for over a fortnight.

  The hatch hissed open. Midshipman Randor - everyone called him Randy - Miles and Midshipman James Pettigrew stepped through, wearing long dark robes that made them look like wizards, rather than starship crewmen. George wondered, as she stood, just how they’d managed to bring the clothes onto the ship, then decided the answer was probably simple. If all of the midshipmen had brought one set, they wouldn't need any more.

  “From this moment on, you do exactly as you’re told, without hesitation,” Randy said, sternly. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nathan said.

  George hesitated - Randy hadn't given any sense of being genuinely randy, but she had the feeling he liked her no better than his superior - and then nodded in agreement. There was no point in disagreeing, not now. It would be better to save her energies for later in the initiation rite. She held herself as steady as she could, refusing to let any sign of fear show on her face despite his proximity. Beside her, Nathan did the same.

  “Strip,” Randy ordered.

  Nathan choked. “What?”

  “Strip,” Randy repeated. “And that was your one warning.”

  George glowered at him. He expected her to strip, as though she was a prisoner in a maximum-security prison? Or, for that matter, Stellar Star in one of the innumerable times she’d been captured by a handsome enemy soldier? It was absurd ... she could just walk out, refusing to take part ... and yet, all the files agreed that spacers rarely respected anyone who refused to go through the initiation rites. They were part and parcel of living in space.

  And he’s probably seen me naked already, she thought. Hell, she was used to being naked in front of her fellow midshipmen. She’d seen him naked a few times too. And I won’t be giving him a sh
ow.

  She kept her eyes on him, defiantly, as she stripped off her shirt and trousers, followed by her bra and panties. They were navy-issue, she knew; there was nothing there to excite even the most depraved pervert. Resting her hands on her hips, she met his eyes as she stood there, as naked as the day she was born. Nathan was naked too, she presumed, but she refused to look away from Randy. He’d have to do more than merely order her to strip if he wanted to break her.

  “Turn around,” Randy ordered. George gritted her teeth, but did as she was told, keeping her hands on her hips. Her movements would be as asexual as possible. “Put your hands behind your backs.”

  George obeyed, then tensed as she felt a plastic tie being wrapped around her wrists, binding her hands firmly in place. She opened her mouth to protest, only to grunt in surprise as someone dropped a black hood over her head. It was hot and uncomfortable; she felt a flicker of panic before realising she could still breathe normally. Someone gripped her arm - standard female grab area, the irrelevant part of her mind noted - and turned her around, pulling her out of the hatch. She knew they couldn't be going far - somehow, she doubted the XO would be amused if two naked midshipmen were stumbling blindfolded through the corridors - but it was disconcerting. Where were they going?