by David Weber
Other people had been less reticent, though . . . and less inclined to play jolly cheerleader than the captain. Steele had spent weeks-months-working on contacts of his own aboard Angela Martens. Delmore might have her stooges among the officers, but Steele knew where to go if you wanted the real dirt. The officer corps always closed ranks to protect the Navy's "good name"-and their own, of course, although that was never mentioned. So if you wanted to get at the things the Navy didn't want you to know (which, by definition, were the ones it was most important to bring to the public's attention), you had to do an end run around the official information channels. If you looked long enough, you could always find someone who was dissatisfied enough-often over the most trivial things, but a man had to work with what he could find-to tell you anything you wanted to know.
Sometimes that someone was a disgruntled officer, sometimes it was an enlisted person or a nomcom. Aboard Angela Martens, it was Petty Officer Third Class Cassius Bradford, a much put upon individual, who, in his own unbiased opinion, should have been at least a chief petty officer by now. The fact that he wasn't had proved a fertile source of information when Steele suggested that perhaps the support of a friendly news report or two might provide PO 3/c Bradford's career with the upward impetus it deserved. Which was how Steele had happened to learn that Admiral Hot Shot Prescott had screwed the pooch.
Again.
For the first time since his assignment to Seventh Fleet, Vincent Steele had truly come face-to-face with his own mortality, and it was Prescott's fault. Angela Martens was a carrier, not a battle-line unit. Even Steele knew carriers weren't supposed to get into missile range of enemy starships-that was why he'd specifically requested a carrier assignment. Oh, intellectually he'd realized that even carriers could be destroyed, but any half-competent admiral would do his best to keep the carriers out of the main fray, if only to preserve the bases from which his own fighters operated.
But that asshole Prescott had managed to get himself caught with his fighters out of position and armed with the wrong external ordnance loads while every damned Bug gunboat in the universe came charging down on TF 71! And, of course, a carrier built on a monitor hull was far too slow and clumsy to dodge kamikazes. Which meant that Angela Martens, as a direct consequence of Prescott's latest screwup, was about to be attacked by waves of antimatter-loaded gunboats whose sole purpose in life was to destroy her and everyone on board her . . . including one Vincent Steele.
Bradford had all but pissed himself when Steele buttonholed him and the petty officer babbled out the latest news-news, which, Steele had noted, Captain Morris hadn't seen fit to put out over the net just yet. Prescott had managed to get all of them into a situation from which they could be rescued only by a miracle. The only way they could possibly beat off the waves of gunboats streaking towards them was to somehow recover their own fighters and manage to get them rearmed and relaunched before the Bugs arrived.
Which, Bradford had assured him, was effectively impossible.
Raw terror threatened to overwhelm Steele, but he'd shoved it aside. There was nothing he could do about what was about to happen, but assuming he himself survived-and despite all Bradford had said, he resolutely refused to consider the possibility that he might not-he could at least ensure that there was proof of the degree to which Prescott had screwed up this time.
He hadn't even considered enlisting Delmore's aid. If she'd known what he was really up to, she might well have turned him in to Captain Morris herself, given the extent to which she'd allowed herself to be co-opted by the Navy. Besides, she was a stickler for obeying every petty military instruction she received. The fact that it was at least as much her job to find out the things the Navy didn't want her to know as to faithfully parrot the things the Navy did want her to know never even seemed to occur to her. She-and the rest of the press pool-had been told the hanger bays were off limits during flight operations, and there was no way she would have accompanied Steele down here. Which was a pity. She might be a brown-nosing bitch, but she did know her way around the guts of these stupid ships a lot better than he did. He could probably have gotten here in half the time if he'd been able to count on her to help. Not to mention the fact that he would have been able to understand a lot more of what was going on with her to interpret.
But she wasn't here, so he'd just have to do the best he could without her.
He edged cautiously closer to the mouth of the alcove in which he'd hidden himself and manipulated the camera control to pan it back and forth across the scene outside it.
Despite his own sophistication (and fear), he had to admit that it was incredibly exciting to watch. He vaguely remembered the briefer who'd escorted his own small clutch of reporters around the hanger decks when they first came aboard. The young woman had seemed far too youthful for her rank as a full lieutenant-more like a teenager in uniform than a real officer. But someone had told him later that she was a Fringer, from one of the out worlds where the antigerone treatments were universally available, so she'd probably been quite a few years older than he'd thought at the time.
But what stuck in his mind now was the way she'd told them that a carrier's hanger deck was the most dangerous assignment in the entire Navy. He'd put it down as hyperbole intended to impress the ignorant rubes of the press, but now he wasn't so sure.
He was glad he was wearing the standard Navy-issue vacsuit he'd been issued from ship's stores. Everyone else was wearing one, too, of course-vacsuits were the Navy's standard battledress, which was probably one of the more reasonable policies it had ever decreed. Although Steele's suit bore the word "PRESS" across the front of the helmet and the shoulder blades, the label was less evident than one might have expected, especially if the person looking at it had something else on his mind. Aside from the press identification, however, Steele's vacsuit looked remarkably like that of an Engineering officer. That was because he was assigned to a life pod attached to Communications, which, in turn, was assigned to the Engineering techs assigned to Com maintenance.
At the moment, however, what was most important about his suit was that its Engineering branch color coding had sufficed to get Steele to his present position without being challenged along the way. Well, that and the fact that as he watched the steady stream of strikefighters sliding in through the monopermeable forcefield which closed the hanger deck off from space, he was profoundly happy to have a vacsuit between himself and what would happen if that forcefield failed.
He zoomed in on the returning fighters as the hanger bay tractors stabbed them and drew them into their positions. Some of them, he knew, would not be returning. No one aboard Angela Martens knew how many of her fighters had been lost in the battle so far, but everyone knew that at least some of them had. According to Bradford, some of those which might have been recovered wouldn't be because their pilots had run out of life-support-the consequence of yet another questionable decision of Prescott's. And some of the fighters which had come home bore the scars of battle.
He zoomed in even closer on one of them, making sure he got good imagery of the battle damage which had shredded one side of its transatmospheric lifting body. Even he knew how incredibly lucky the pilot of that fighter was to have made it back to base. The rule was that any hit which got through to a fighter and managed to penetrate the surface of its drive field was always fatal. In this case, however, what had gotten through had obviously been an energy weapon of some sort-probably a laser-rather than a warhead, and the hit had been a grazing one, which had somehow managed to shatter a divot out of the fighter's fuselage without taking anything vital with it.
He made sure he got good footage of the battle damage as the fighter slid past him in the grip of its tractor beam, then panned the camera across the hordes of hanger deck technicians who were converging at a run on each fighter as it was deposited on the servicing stand in its individual bay.
He held the view steady on Fighter Bay 62's deck crew as it swarmed about the fighter assigned
to its care. He had to be careful to stay well back in his hiding place, because he knew for certain that they'd kick his butt out if they spotted him. Fortunately, the alcove in which he sheltered was deep enough and had enough shadows that it was extremely unlikely anyone would notice his presence. Especially not anyone who was concentrating as much on the task at hand as these people were. Despite any reservations he might still have about the Navy and the personnel who normally served in it, Steele had to admit that he'd never seen anyone move as quickly as the members of the deck crew he was watching.
He'd decided not to record any more voice-over just now. Not because he was afraid of being overheard-the crews servicing the fighters were making too much noise for him to worry about that, even if everyone hadn't been wearing the helmets regulations required at all times here. No, it was mostly because he really didn't have much of a clue what any of the people he was watching were doing. Maybe he could get Delmore to help him with the details later-after she finished pissing and moaning over the way he'd gotten the footage in the first place. For right now, he would just concentrate on getting as much imagery as he could. After all, he could always shape the story later. Who knew? If Prescott managed to luck out again, Steele might even turn it into still another piece praising him as a tactical genius . . . instead of lambasting him for getting himself caught with his trousers down this way.
He and his camera watched the deck crew as they flowed around the fighter like participants in some high-tech ballet. Umbilicals were dragged out of recessed compartments in the deck and plugged into ports on the belly of the fighter. More techs disappeared underneath the fighter's fuselage with mag-lev pallets. In what seemed only seconds, they were crawling back out from under, hauling the pallets behind them, and Steele panned the camera over the external ordnance packs they'd removed. He wasn't certain exactly what type of ordnance it was, but that was something else Delmore could tell him.
The heavy canopy of the fighter slid back, and Steele swung the camera hastily back to the pilot. Unfortunately, the pilot-he couldn't even tell if it was male or female from outside its heavy combination grav-vacsuit-made no move to remove the opaque-visored helmet. Someone passed up a small container. After a moment, Steele recognized it as a zero-gee beverage bulb, and the pilot attached the strawlike drinking tube to a helmet nipple.
Steele grimaced. Maybe a little bit of that sort of thing could be used as a human interest angle, but it wasn't what he was here for, and he turned back to the deck crew.
Two of the techs had crawled up on top of the fighter, plugging still more umbilicals into ports behind the opened canopy, and another trio of them were undogging access panels on either side of the nose and directly beneath the needle-sharp prow. Once again, Steele wasn't all sure what he was seeing, although he seemed vaguely to remember something about the "internal hetlasers" which were part of the latest generation Navy fighter's armament. The techs seemed to be inspecting and adjusting whatever was inside the panels, which wasn't all that interesting, so he tracked back around to the ones with the pallets.
They were shoving the pallets up against a bulkhead. Normally, Steele knew, the Navy was downright fanatic about always properly securing gear, but right now, haste was obviously more important than dotting every "i" and crossing every "t." One of the techs working on the hetlasers (if that was what they were actually doing) had already narrowly missed being squashed. He might not even realize it, given his absolute concentration on his own task, but one of the mag-lev pallets had missed him by less than a meter as it was dragged back out of the way. Steele suspected that regulations would normally have prohibited having both sets of technicians working away at once in such a confined space, but this wasn't a day for "normally," and the pallet-towing techs only pushed their charges as far to the side as they would go. Then they used a pair of portable tractor grabs to hoist the ordnance packs off them before they turned and started across the bay, almost directly towards Steele.
Steele felt a moment of consternation. There was no way he could evade detection if they walked right up to him, and that seemed to be exactly what they were going to do. But then his consternation eased. As busy as everyone was, he might even be able to talk his way off the hanger deck without their ever summoning an officer to turn him in to. And even if he couldn't, what were they going to do to him? It wasn't as if anyone could convince a jury that he was a spy for the Bugs, after all! Besides-
He'd switched his helmet microphone out of the circuit to his external speakers when he began filming. The camera had been able to hear him just fine through the internal circuit, and there'd been no point in making any noise which someone might have heard. But he'd left the external audio pickup live so he could hear what was happening around him.
He'd just reached for the wrist-mounted control panel and switched the internal microphone back on when he heard something over the external mike.
It came from behind him, and he turned in surprise.
* * *
Irma sat in her cockpit, nerves still jittering from the excitement and adrenaline of combat. Sitting here, her suit umbilicals still attached to the fighter's life support systems, while the service techs swarmed over the bird was a direct violation of about two billion regulations. Breaking regulations, in itself, normally didn't bother Irma very much, but these regulations, she approved of, for the very good reason that they were expressly designed to keep her butt alive. All sorts of things could go wrong while life support systems were purged, flushed, and replenished. Then there were the altogether too many interesting things that could happen when the depleted super conductor rings were replaced with a freshly charged set . . . without completely powering down the systems in the process. Of course, no one aboard the entire carrier would care very much if one of the weapons techs somehow managed to deactivate the antimatter containment field on one of the FM-3 missiles they were supposed to mount on her bird's hard points. After all, the explosion of one of those missiles inside the Martens would blow them all to Hell so quickly that they'd never even realize they were dead.
Normally, she didn't worry about things like that. But "normally" it took a minimum of almost thirty minutes to completely service and rearm an F-4 . . . and according to Togliatti, they were going to do it in ten. Which meant every safety margin The Book insisted upon was being completely ignored. Not just here in Bay 62, but everywhere aboard the MT(V).
As she watched the service techs moving in a sort of disciplined frenzy, she decided that she was undoubtedly safer sitting right where she was-possible unscheduled life-support surges or not-than she would have been out there in the middle of all that moving equipment.
She'd just finished the electrolyte-laden drink the crew chief had passed her when the screams began.
* * *
Vincent Steele didn't recognize the sound behind him. If he had, he might have been able to move in time. But instead of immediately flinging himself out of the way, he turned in place just as the hatch cover irised open . . .
. . . and discovered that the "alcove" in which he'd hidden himself was the hatch end of the high-speed magazine tube which delivered fighter ordnance to the bay.
There were six FM-3 missiles on the transfer pallet. Each of them was four meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter, and the pallet was traveling at well over two hundred kilometers per hour.
All things being equal, the reporter was unreasonably lucky that it only hit him at the mid-thigh level. He was equally lucky in the quality of the medical services aboard Angela Martens, and in the training of the corpsman who was there almost before the pallet finished severing his left leg entirely and crushing the right one into paste.
In the end, the Navy even paid for both his prosthetic legs.
* * *
Irma Sanchez swore vilely as the mass driver's tractors picked her fighter up and settled it into the guides. The Martens' strikegroup was launching in whatever order it could scramble back into space, and VF-94-which
ought to have been one of the very first, given its experience level-was eleventh in line, and all thanks to that idiot reporter! Togliatti had held the rest of the squadron until she was ready, rather than peel her out of the squadron datalink, and she knew why he had. This was a maximum effort mission. If she'd lost her place in VF-94's net, they would have plugged her in with some cluster of stragglers from other squadrons. Georghiu wouldn't have had any choice-they needed every fighter they had, and they needed veterans with her experience even more. But the chances of her surviving combat in a furball like this with squadron mates she'd never flown with and who hadn't flown with her would have been virtually nonexistent.
So because an asshole of a newsie had been somewhere he had no business being, the entire squadron was launching late . . . and the only place worse than flying lead in a strike like this was to come in as Tail-End Charlie.
* * *
Prescott and his staff were still on the flag bridge, anxiously examining the statistics, when the last of the fighters came straggling back.
The rearming had been carried out-barely-and the already exhausted pilots had gone out to face gunboats that outnumbered them three-to-two. But their superiority at dogfighting had more than compensated, and they'd killed most of the attackers well short of the battle-line. Most . . . but not all. And the survivors had concentrated on TF 71's monitors, following their own ripple-fired FRAMs in as they sought self-immolation. Three monitors had been destroyed, along with three battlecruisers that had sought to screen them.