Valor At Vauzlee

by DePrima, Thomas

  "I was just one of thousands at the battle. It's not right."

  "They couldn't very well list everyone who fought there; there isn't enough room on the front page. So they took the most visible person for their story."

  "You're probably right. That'll teach me to go around destroying Raider warships and their bases," Jenetta said with a sardonic grin.

  * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  ~ June 17th, 2268 ~

  Recalled to the base thirty days following the battle, the five ships that had been performing picket duties joined the eight so far returned in response to the emergency message sent by Gavin to all ships on patrol in the deca-sector. Emergency repairs to four of the ships that had fought the battle, Prometheus, Chiron, Geneva, and Buenos Aires, had been completed, and while they might be in the dockyards for months while repairs necessary to bring them back to full fighting trim were completed, they were at least sufficiently space worthy to travel to the Mars facility under their own power. Three ships, Thor, Bonn, and Calgary, were so badly damaged that they might have to be towed to the Mars facility. Crew loses had been especially heavy on those ships.

  All repair efforts had so far been directed at the ships, so the docking ring and station still bore the terrible scars of battle. Huge sections had been sealed off and less than a dozen docking piers in the ring could be utilized. Quartermaster ships, filled with supplies and building materials, were already underway from Earth and half a dozen other planets. Transport ships filled with base construction crews were also on their way. Higgins was too vital to the security of its deca-sector and the economical stability of the Galactic Alliance to have it non-operational for long.

  The Song, with a current crew size of more than two-thousand one-hundred, was assigned one of the few available berths on the docking ring. The others were occupied by the ships damaged in the battle. The four arriving destroyers from the battle of Vauzlee, with crew sizes of about seven-hundred, were required to remain in orbit and use their shuttles for station access. Since the shopping concourse was still closed down, easy access to the station by off-duty crewmembers wasn't as important as it normally was.

  With the lifting of the ban on travel to Higgins, sporadic passenger and freight traffic already in transit began to appear around the station almost immediately. The destroyed Raider ships, after being searched for personnel trapped in air-tight areas, had been towed to a ‘salvage farm' area guarded by security forces from the station. Over the coming months, Intelligence teams would scour the ships for any information that could provide a clue about Raider base locations, and other planned or completed operations.

  Of the seventy-two vessels that had assaulted the base, just sixteen were sufficiently space-worthy to flee when the Glorious was destroyed. The fifty-six ships lost in this fight, combined with the thirty-four lost at Vauzlee, and the fifty-eight lost when Raider-One exploded, meant that the Raider threat in this part of space had been pushed back to levels from which they hopefully might never recover. At the very least, travelers should be safe from pirates for several years to come.

  The Song had no sooner completed its docking procedure than Jenetta received an order to report to Admiral Holt's office. The order called for her immediate appearance. She hurried to change her tunic and brush her hair before rushing off the ship.

  Owing to the severe damage and the necessary circuitous route required to bypass closed sections of the docking ring and station, the trip to the Headquarters Section of the base took three times longer than normal. And then she was required to sit in the Admiral's outer office for another twenty minutes before the com beeped and the Admiral's aide motioned that she should go in. She tugged on her tunic to straighten it as she stood up, then walked down the short hallway. The double doors to the Admiral's office opened before she reached them. Upon entering the large room, she walked directly to the conference table where Admiral Holt and half a dozen senior officers were seated. She recognized Admiral Margolan - the senior JAG officer on Higgins, Commander Kanes of Intelligence, Captain Gavin, Captain Powers of the Chiron, and four of the five captains whose ships had formed the basic protection force for the base and who had fought in the battle. Without acknowledging the others, she came to rigid attention facing the admiral, a meter from the table.

  "Lieutenant Commander Carver, reporting as ordered, sir," she said, staring straight ahead.

  The admiral looked at her intently, for a full ten seconds, without saying anything. While facing his withering glare during the incredibly long scrutiny, Jenetta refused to twitch or move a single muscle, except for normal respiration.

  "You were ordered to proceed directly to Higgins Space Station by Captain Gavin," he said gravely. "You chose to ignore those orders, did you not?"

  "Um, no sir; not exactly."

  "What?" the admiral said, before turning to glance at Gavin, whose only response was to return the look, furrow his brow, and shrug his shoulders almost imperceptibly.

  "Those were not my precise orders, sir. Captain Gavin ordered me to depart immediately for Higgins at our maximum speed. I appended a copy of that logged message to the report I submitted immediately following the battle here. I held a quick meeting with my senior staff to make preparations for departure, and we left as soon as practicable. The Song was under way within twenty-four minutes of my being awakened and notified of both a Priority-One message and the departure of the Prometheus and Chiron, sir."

  "And you interpreted those orders to mean that you could then deviate from them at any point you chose?"

  "I was ordered to leave immediately for Higgins, and we did. Nothing in my orders specifically precluded a small deviation of four-minutes and fifty-two seconds for good and valid reasons."

  "Knowing that the station was under attack by an enemy force of significantly greater strength, and that seconds mattered, you felt that you had a good and valid reason for deviating from course?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Explain."

  "My senior communications chief discovered an inordinate amount of encrypted com traffic originating from a point some fourteen-billion kilometers from the base while the battle was under way here. I suspected that a command ship or group might be operating from a safe location. I believed that if I could interrupt the flow of command instructions, it would impede their attack by sending the enemy ships here into disarray, making it easier to overcome their remaining forces when we arrived. I ordered my ship to the source of the communications signals expecting to find a command ship and several screening vessels. We were fortunate in that there was only one ship at the location. We dropped our envelope, fired a full spread of torpedoes from our bow tubes, then immediately resumed course for Higgins at our maximum sub-light speed while building our envelope. Sir, I knew that I was stepping slightly outside the spirit of my orders, but that I had already technically adhered to the letter of those orders."

  "Have you become a space lawyer, Commander?" Admiral Holt asked scathingly.

  "No, sir. But officers will, at times, be faced with situations that force them to examine closely the letter of their orders, and make a decision as to just how much leeway they have to best accomplish the true mission, as they see it."

  Admiral Holt again looked intently at Jenetta for ten seconds without saying anything. He finally broke the silence by saying, "The true mission, as they see it?"

  "Yes, sir. As I saw it, my mission was to protect this base by destroying as much of the enemy as possible, and ending the attack on Higgins as quickly as possible. I believed that I had information not available to CIC, and that taking time to await approval to divert from course would have exhausted precious seconds, or even minutes, we couldn't spare."

  Admiral Holt took a deep breath and released it. "This time you get away with it, Commander. A post-analysis of the battle, using our station sensor logs and information obtained from captured Raider prisoners, corroborates your theory that the Raider action was being direc
ted from that remote location. It's also the only reasonable explanation for the Raiders jamming our DDG net when they arrived. It wasn't to hide the number of ships in their fleet, or the existence of a second force, as we originally thought, but to hide the arrival and continued presence of the command vessel. When the ships attacking Higgins lost contact with their command ship, they must have panicked. Since they knew that we had surprised them with an unknown force at Vauzlee, we believe they might have feared another unknown force was about to descend upon them. In all probability your action saved this station and our protection force from complete destruction. I've decided that you are to be officially commended for your insight, resourcefulness, and courage under fire."

  Jenetta smiled slightly as relief coursed through her. "Thank you, sir."

  "As you no doubt realize, assembling initial crews for the Prometheus and Chiron greatly taxed the limited personnel resources of this command. With the casualties at Vauzlee, and those here at this latest engagement, we have become seriously short of senior officers in this deca-sector. Therefore, you will not rejoin the Prometheus as Captain Gavin had informed you; at least not yet. You will instead remain in command of the Song until you reach Earth, as originally intended following the Vauzlee action."

  "Aye, sir."

  "That's all, Commander. Dismissed."

  Jenetta braced to attention, turned on her heel, and walked from the room.

  As the doors closed behind her, Jenetta stopped to breathe deeply and release it slowly before continuing down the hallway to the outer office.

  Inside the office, Admiral Holt drew in a deep breath and expelled it quickly. As he replaced his sham scowl with a wide grin, he said, "Damn, I like that young officer. No criticism of present company is intended, you all know the esteem I hold for you, but I wish that I had a dozen more just like her to form the core of the next generation of senior officers that will safeguard this part of space."

  "She had to know that she was risking her career when she deviated from course," Admiral Margolan said. "A board of inquiry might even have found her guilty of dereliction of duty if she had guessed wrong."

  "Of course she knew," Gavin said. "But I doubt if it made her hesitate for more than a few seconds. Her perspicacity has never been in question. She correctly assessed the situation and took the only course of action that her intelligence and sense of duty would allow."

  "I'm glad your orders didn't specify that she come directly to Higgins," Admiral Holt said. "Her sense of duty might have forced her into following the letter of those orders. The Raiders were giving us a damn rough time there at the end. I doubt that the Song's weapons could even have made that much of a difference in the outcome, when you consider that with three of our seven ships completely out of the action and the other four seriously damaged and almost out of action themselves, the Raiders, with sixteen ships still able to fight, had a considerable edge in fighting effectiveness."

  "We're just fortunate that so many of the Raider ships were of Tsgardi manufacture," Captain Powers of the Chiron said. "The Uthlaro ships, while still inferior to our own, held up substantially better. If the entire Raider fleet had been Uthlaro built, we would have been far worse off. And I shudder to think what might have happened if their ships were as tough as ours. If not for our advance knowledge of the attack at Vauzlee and our subsequent victory there, they would have outnumbered the base protection force by twenty to one. With those odds, the station would have fallen for sure. By the way, I've seen the simulation of the Battle of Vauzlee just released by Supreme HQ to the media. The victory appears all the more impressive when viewed from an outside perspective. Commander Carver should be officially commended for developing the battle strategy for that engagement."

  "She deserves a lot more credit than that, Steve," Gavin said, chuckling.

  "What do you mean, Larry?"

  Gavin looked towards Admiral Holt to confirm that it was okay to brief the group. Holt decided to answer the question himself.

  "Simply that all eight of the India plans we prepared for the defense of this station were devised by Commander Carver," Holt said grinning. "Larry contacted her right after your ship and the Prometheus arrived here. With my approval, he relayed our situation, then subtly asked her what strategy she'd employ. Her tactics revolved around a prediction that the Raiders would most likely arrive as one force, and fire a full salvo of torpedoes at our ships from a great distance rather than waiting until they got closer, believing that we'd just sit on our— positions, and try to knock down all incoming torpedoes. Commander Carver's proposed response to the arrival of the Raider armada, India-One, required me to throw away the book.

  "I don't mind telling you that her battle plans scared the hell out of me at first. If we followed the first two, we'd be giving the Raiders a clear path to the station. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the only viable solution if the Raiders did as she predicted. And with the number of torpedoes they initially launched at us, and the Echo-Three constraint that we hold position and knock down all incoming birds, we would have seen our protection fleet destroyed at the very outset of the battle. Having us align ourselves in front of the station as if we really were following Echo-Three was inspired. The Raiders no doubt believed that we were following Echo-Three and totally wasted their first volley. And if they didn't attack as she expected, we could still follow the scripted actions of Echo-Three.

  "But if India-One was successful, Commander Carver gave India-Two a ninety-eight percent chance of being just as successful. As you know, those two maneuvers alone reduced the Raider force by a full thirty warships, with fourteen more severely damaged. That represented half of their strength. India-Three could have taken another third to a half of their remaining force, but we never got to implement it because the first two maneuvers were so enormously successful. The late Admiral Nazeer, of the battleship Glorious, saw us whittling down his ships and decided to use what vessels he had left to wash over us in two large assault waves while he still had a force large enough to accomplish that. India-Four was Commander Carver's response if and when they took that action. And she knew that following that point, the attack would devolve into individual ship attacks. The other four India plans were our responses in case the Raiders didn't arrive as one large force, but rather attacked initially from multiple points less than two minutes weapons distance from our ships, immediately pinning us in a defensive posture between them and the station."

  "I believe," Gavin said, "that if we had followed the standard tactics developed by the War College for the defense of GSC orbiting stations, we wouldn't now be sitting here calmly discussing said tactics. They're probably perfectly adequate for defense against two or three ships, or even half a dozen, but certainly not for an attack like the one we faced."

  Kanes began chuckling loudly. When the others at the table looked at him, he said, "I should have recognized Commander Carver's hand in those tactics. They're very unlike anything you're going to find in a Space Command battle strategy handbook. While India-Two was spectacularly devious, India-Four even surpassed that. I can't imagine where she got the idea of covering the keel of all seven warships with mines that could be released to create an instant minefield in front of an attacking enemy. It always seems that whatever she comes up with is— unique."

  "Throughout this past year," Gavin said, "Carver has repeatedly proven her brilliance as a military tactician. Prior to the Battle at Vauzlee, she spoke to Commander Kanes and myself of the Austro-Turkish War of 1683, specifically mentioning the Battle of Vienna. She said that the battle marked the turning point in the three-hundred-year struggle between Central European kingdoms and the Ottoman Empire. I believe that the Battle for Higgins will prove to mark the turning point in our decade old battle with the Raiders."

  "She certainly doesn't lack guts either," Captain Payton said. "I've viewed the image logs she submitted of her attack on that Raider battleship. It has to be the most formidable
looking warship I've ever seen. She just barged in there, dropped her envelope, and fired her torpedoes without worrying about being outgunned twenty or thirty to one."

  "I'm not trying to derogate her bravery," Captain Simpson of the destroyer Bonn said, "when I say she expected to be gone before they could return torpedo fire. She certainly could have found herself in a situation well beyond her control. But since she had already planned her exit, I have to admit that it was a most intelligent attack strategy."

  "Yes," Captain Hoyt of the destroyer Calgary agreed. "Carver is an intelligent young officer. But perhaps she takes too many risks. Conservative isn't a word you can apply to any of her tactical plans. I must admit it alarms me a little, and I genuinely fear for the safety of the people under her command. Every plan seems to be an all or nothing line of attack."

  "I think that I know her well enough by now to say with complete confidence," Kanes said, "that you can be quite sure all risks have been calculated from every possible angle before she acts. Provided, of course, that she has the time to consider her actions. And where she doesn't have time, her native intuition has proven uncanny. Your perception might come from the fact that she doesn't shrink from a fight. She believes in taking the battle to the enemy wherever and whenever she feels the odds are in her favor. And I happen to agree with her. We won't win this war by avoiding conflict."

  "It sounds like you're a real fan, Keith." Captain Pope of the destroyer Geneva said. "Have you tried to recruit her for your Intelligence Section?"

  "Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. The recruiters at the Academy slipped up royally by not considering her. I would love to have her in my section. Unfortunately, she has her heart set on being aboard a warship."

  "She seems to have recovered well enough from her wound that she can walk without any sort of aid," Admiral Holt said.