“With these algorithms, we can track a bowling ball out to the Cassini Limit.” Smiling with evident pride as he said it. Kris, who’d never heard of a bowling ball before (clearly a challenging target), smiled back, matching his expression as best she could. That concluded the visit, and with a cheery farewell from Martinez, a civil nod from Martin, and a total lack of anything from Warland (who was staring fixedly at the main ESM console and fiddling industriously), they made their exit.
“Don’t be too hard on Mike,” Wagner said in confidential murmur when they were alone in the passageway. “Good guy, just quiet. And”—he dropped his voice even further—“he broke up with Sara right before this cruise. Hates standing watch with her.”
“Oh.”
Apparently thinking something else was called for—Kris got the feeling Wagner had his own interests in the attractive young jig and wasn’t sorry to have the field clear—he went on to explain that they had “I dunno, three or four other Luisa’s and gawd knows how many Maria’s” in the crew, so Martinez had adopted Sara as preferable to being assigned a number.
“You don’t really assign people numbers, do ya?” Kris exclaimed in a low, shocked voice.
“No, of course not”—taken aback by her vehemence. “It’s sort of a joke. Like we have a bunch of Henry’s too. Most go by Hank or something, but there was this new guy last cruise, he liked to call himself Henry the Eighth—thought it was really funny for some reason. That’s how it got started. But Sara, she prefers it. Maria Luisa’s her mother’s name, I guess.”
“Oh.” Kris was a bit sorry for her reaction—she should have realized he wasn’t serious—so when he said, “Hey, I’m gonna grab some coffee before I turn in. You wouldn’t want some, would’ja?” she impulsively agreed, then wondered if she’d made a regrettable choice.
They spent the stroll to the junior officer’s mess in small talk, or rather he did, seeming quite happy with Kris’s noncommittal and, at times, monosyllabic answers. It wasn’t until they were sipping their coffee together, companionably enough, that he asked anything approaching a personal question, and that was only to inquire what track she was in.
“Pilot candidate.”
“Really?” A wistful look came over his face, and he shook his head. “Washed outta that myself. Right at the beginning of basic flight. No slots in gunnery these days. Got put into sensors instead.”
Which explained a lot, Kris thought silently.
“Got into the advanced program, I take it?” By Wagner’s reckoning, a cadet exceptional enough to be rated midshipman would obviously be an AFP candidate.
Kris felt her ears get warm. “Uh . . . well, I really hope I do.”
He looked blank. “You mean, you’re not an upper—” and bit the question off.
She answered with a self-conscious shrug and shook her head.
“Oh. That’s a . . .” He paused to consider what it might be. “That’s impressive.” But she wasn’t sure he sounded impressed.
“Thanks. And, um—” She gestured a little haphazardly with the half-full plastic coffee cup. “Thanks for showing me around.”
He crumpled his own cup with a tight-edged smile. “Pleasure. See you in the AM.”
“Yes—Lieutenant.”
They parted ways and Kris hurried back to her berth. So much for avoiding social hitches by accepting a shipboard assignment. Slings and arrows—always the fucking slings and arrows.
Chapter Three
LSS Retribution
New Madras Outstation, Hydra Border Zone
The holographic volume of the big omnisynth dominated Retribution’s Combat Information Center, the battlecruiser’s tactical brain. If CIC were to be described as the brain of the ship (a pedant might have suggested that cerebral cortex was more accurate), the omnisynth might fairly be called its frontal lobe. Not, however, its heart. As with all CEF warships, Retribution’s heart lay on the bridge, in the person of her captain, or in his absence, in his duly appointed vicar, the Officer of the Deck. The CEF insisted on this division of heart and mind on the grounds that the captain’s primary purpose was to lead. CIC was the most heavily shielded part of any warship, tucked deep in the ship’s core, and in the CEF’s view, proper leadership could not be exercised while sitting in a comfy armored bubble.
CEF captains therefore fought the ship from the bridge, while the executive officer was stationed in CIC, there communing with the Tactical Action Officer and assembling the overall picture needed for the captain to exercise command. That command was actually carried out through the TAO; if the captain fought the ship, it was the TAO who actually struck the blows. And it was the TAO, not the executive officer, who took over the ship if the captain was killed or incapacitated.
It was a romantic notion, but the CEF was, on the whole, a romantic service. The opposing view, typified by the decidedly unromantic Halith Imperial Navy, was that hearts and minds should work as one. Halith also considered star captains and admirals vital assets to be protected at all costs. Accordingly, they placed the captain in CIC, where he (female captains being unheard of in the Halith Navy) fought the ship through his Weapons Control Officer and Electronic Warfare Officer, relaying maneuver orders to his executive officer stationed on the bridge. If this contravened the hallowed principle of leading from the front, so be it. Halith mariners were not expected to need inspirational leadership; they were expected to do as they were told.
Most other navies also adopted this arrangement, the Ionians being the sole current exception, but that was due more to their fiercely egalitarian nature than any romantic ideals. Ionian sailors (the term they preferred) became ornery, if not downright mutinous, when a captain “came it the heavy” over them, or “acted the Topping John” in their colorful way of speaking. (The other exception had been the Royal Navy of the New United Kingdom of Friesia and New Caledonia, but they had abandoned the practice decades ago.)
So it was their romantic bent that set the CEF apart, as much or more than their doctrine. They cherished the distinction, and indeed it sometimes overflowed to the point of taking on a religious tint: a ship’s soul, as well as her heart, was often spoken of, and overtly theist commanders (commonly known as ‘blue-lights’) were not unusual. Vice Admiral Angharad Ross, the commander of Seventh Fleet in Cygnus Sector, was a notable example.
Blue-light commanders aside, the theist impulse in the CEF was, however, diffuse and ecumenical, or absent altogether. The bluff and profane Admiral PrenTalien was much more the standard model than the primly reverential Admiral Ross, and if Rear Admiral Lo Gai Sabr had religion, most were convinced it involved dancing naked under a full moon brandishing the entrails of his enemies. (A visual frequently enlivened by including the admiral’s tall, beautiful, and equally bloody-minded spouse, Senior Captain Yasmin Shariati, a former privateer and the only permanently appointed commodore in the Service. It was not without reason that throughout the lower decks the couple was known as ‘Demon Gin and the Devil’s Dancing Girl’.)
But neither hearts nor souls, frontal lobes nor dancing girls were on the minds of anyone present in Retribution’s CIC that morning. Their enemy’s entrails were another question, as the frustration of the AM’s planning meeting mounted. What the omnisynth’s holographic volume currently displayed was an expanded view of the Hydra, cluttered with routes accessible to grav-lens technology, the much rarer favorable jump nodes, old battlefields, what intelligence they had about slaver activities, Bannerman patrols and other ship movements (often dated), and a spatter of colored pinpricks indicating a meager handful of League-associated settlements.
“Frankly, sir, it’s a real dog’s breakfast.” Senior Lieutenant Elisabeth Gill, head of the Astrogation Department, laid her pointer on the omnisynth’s wide lip. She’d just brought up an overlay of the fuel consumption projected for each of the proposed patrol options, and it was much worse than estimated: the Admiralty’s astrocartography branch had not fully appreciated the degree of local variabilit
y here and their charts were obsolete. Like all large warships, Retribution was fitted with an enormous magnetic ram-scoop to garner antimatter from fuel fields (were any available), but given the challenging environments in which the fields were found, this was only done under exceptional circumstances, the task usually being assigned to specially equipped harvesting ships.
Captain Lawrence would have risked it, but it hardly mattered. The New Madras station had sent out deep-probes and buoys to collect the latest data, which had been downloaded yesterday afternoon. It showed that the few sparse fuel fields, so thin as to be barely worth the trouble, lay far from their assigned sectors. The rest of the squadron, especially the short-winded frigates, would have to feed off Retribution’s fuel reserves, and this necessity was proving to be a very serious limitation.
Nor was it the only one. Amidst the fuzzy volumes that marked out the cruising limits their fuel status restricted them to, Lieutenant Gill had plotted the latest data on tides and currents, as mariners referred to the gravitational lensing phenomena for which the Hydra was noted, and which made it so favorable to grav-lens drives and inhospitable to jump drives. Tides and currents were unpredictable and variable, in the sense that they exhibited fluctuations known as jitter, pulse, and slap (slap being the worst; it was the severe slap that made the famed Rip so deadly), which added to the more prevalent navigational hazards like rip and skeer. A few of the probes sent out to map these conditions had not reported in yet, and that itself was a bad sign.
Gill, not bothering with the pointer, waved a finger at the mess. “You can see how those currents have shifted right across the lanes we want to cover. They’re asymmetric, of course, and nonlinear with respect to mass, so if we go in, anyone downstream will be able to hear us days out, but we probably won’t be able to detect them. And even if we do, it’ll be next to impossible to get a decent read because of the way the lensing distorts phase wakes. They couldn’t have arranged it better if God was their bitch. We might as well send out engraved invitations!” (Liz Gill had had a very long night of it.)
Captain Lawrence looked to Lieutenant Commander Alicia Easley, his conning officer, and Senior Lieutenant Aaron Chimunaya, the lead navigator.
“We can work around it,” Lieutenant Chimunaya said, leaning forward to highlight the plot, “but it’ll take weeks. And the way things seem to be hopping out there, who knows what we’ll find when we arrive? It’s a stern chase with a chaotic quantity.”
Lawrence looked over at Huron, who was sitting beside Commander Ravenswood. “Get ahead of them?” he commented with a flinty smile.
“Sir,” Commander Ravenswood interjected before Huron could say anything, “I’ve been reviewing the data with Commander Huron, and there may be another issue.”
The captain inclined his head, the smile becoming fixed.
“It’s a bit embarrassing, sir. I’m not sure why GS3 didn’t think of it, but the Commander pointed out that the slaver traffic info GS3 used when they assigned us our patrol sectors is based on intercepts.” That was obvious enough. “But we only get intercepts where we look. There’s a lot of places we don’t.”
Sir Philip received the news with a closed, now-they-tell-me expression. “So your judgment is that the General Staff’s Operations Department lacks a sufficient grasp of slaver activity in the Hydra upon which to base a viable operational plan. Is that it in a nutshell?”
“I doubt they’d agree with that, sir. But on talking with Commander Huron, I concur. Our patrols of the Hydra have been opportunistic, not systematic. That’s mainly what CID’s and ONI’s projections are derived from. They get fed back to GS3 and—”
“Self-fulfilling prophesy. We see what we expect to see because we’ve already seen it.”
“Just so, sir.”
The captain pulled his jaw; something, Kris noted, he’d been doing a lot of. She was sitting next to Huron, on the side opposite Commander Ravenswood, maintaining an obdurate silence. Huron had brought her along to the meeting, saying it would be most edifying, and it was—though not in the way she’d expected.
Now, Sir Phillip fixed his attention on her. Whether he was thinking of crystal balls or ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’, he alone knew. Happily, his question avoided expressing either. Unhappily, Kris wondered if he was laying down a coil of rope in the hope she might hang herself with it.
“Well, Midshipman, you are reputed to know something of these parts. What do you say? Are we looking in the wrong place?”
Feeling like an insect being prepared for mounting, Kris cleared her throat nervously. Twice. “Sir, I—I can’t say really. Slavers do like to lie up doggo and—”
“Doggo, Midshipman?”
“Sorry, sir. I mean they fly a cold ballistic, keel down, so they can’t be heard. Then when they get to a nice tide race, they’ll jump from there. So like the Lieutenant said, even if you hear ‘em—”
“They jump while they’re in a tide race?” Lieutenant Gill and her lead navigator shared a look of mingled horror and disbelief. Attempting a jump under those lensing conditions would introduce all sorts of uncertainties into the convolution calcs, with potentially fatal results.
“Sure,” Kris said, puzzled and unwilling to show it. “If you’re legged enough, you can get away with it.” Harlot’s Ruse was a converted ore carrier, not quite the size of a destroyer but fitted with heavy mass cruiser drives, and that was why. And perhaps she should have said usually get away with it, but that was neither here nor there, as far as their mission was concerned.
“Good lord,” muttered the lieutenant.
“One might presume that they have favored locales for this lying up doggo business?” Sir Phillip inquired, icily polite.
“They do, sir. But I don’t know what any of ‘em are called on your—our—charts. A prime one was Killian's Reach.”
“Killian's Reach,” Sir Phillip repeated, perhaps struck by the name—a romantic-sounding name. “And you might recall something more than a name? Perhaps?”
“Ah—” Kris swallowed against the dryness in her mouth. “They used this little globular cluster as a primary guide ref, and there was an asterism there. I could probably getcha some transform parameters too.”
It wasn’t at all clear that the captain had actually been expecting a constructive answer, but after his eyebrows resettled into their accustomed position, his face relaxed into a more humane expression than it had worn so far that AM.
“Very well, Ms. Kennakris. I’ll ask you to confer with Lieutenant Gill to see if this Killian's Reach can be pinned down. Commander Ravenswood, if you will accompany me, we shall go beat the brass over this execrable fuel situation they have saddled us with. There is, to my certain knowledge, at least one lighter lurking about the station—perhaps two. I mean to possess it before the dogs bark this evening. The rest of you, carry on.”
Two hours later, fresh from a successful campaign to secure a fuel lighter for his squadron, Captain Lawrence saw his xel light up with the face of Lieutenant Gill, wearing a broad and unmilitary grin.
“I think we got it, sir: whiskey-delta four-zero. It’s an old battle zone. Used to be a major nexus, but fifty or sixty years ago, there was a shift and a nasty current set up through there. It shows creep—about an arcsecond and a half per year—and has heavy jitter but not much slap. So it’s manageable, if you’ve got the legs to run it. And there’s so much ancient clutter in there, it’s a great place to lie up and drift if you’re waiting for someone.”
“Can we get there without notifying the entire neighborhood?”
“I believe so, sir. We’ve forwarded the data to Commander Easley for review, but it looks like we can make a deep run and then cut the current at victor-echo four-two. There’s a tributary we can ride awhile and then skate in real shallow. That should set us up nicely.”
“Please be specific about what you mean by awhile, Ms. Gill.”
“Beg your pardon, sir. Six days, sixteen hours—best estimate.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Carry on, Lieutenant.”
Furling his xel, he looked over at Huron, who was standing by. “Crystal ball, eh?”
When Huron responded with nothing more than a slight nod and an ambiguous smile, he bobbed his own head once and tugged his angular chin.
“A week, give or take. Well, that gives us some time to work the people up. Best be about it.”
Chapter Four
LSS Retribution
entering Challenger Deeps, en route to Killian's Reach
They went about it, and the crews responded with more zeal than their officers perhaps expected. The prospect of cruising hitherto unpicked regions that might yield a rich harvest spurred them on, and the mariners’ age-old delight in subverting the will of constituted authority helped as well. (Sir Phillip’s orders allowed considerable latitude, but the crews knew they were to cruise far beyond their set bounds and reveled in what they chose to view as taking liberties with the spirit, if not the letter, of the orders.)
Or perhaps it was a deeper feeling, a manifestation of the Navy’s true religion, superseding all others, and still expressed on very formal occasions by the phrase “Her Ladyship’s Battlecruiser” (in the case of LSS Retribution). Luck was the Lady in question, for the CEF was devoted to fortune. Mariners still prayed, as they had for eons (though rarely aloud these days), for ‘a fair wind from the Sun’—among fighter pilots, the formula ran, ‘Good hunting and target-rich environment’—and luck was a quality mariners were exquisitely sensitive to.
By whatever sixth sense mariners used to detect luck, or its absence, the crew of the Retribution had concluded Kris was lucky. This conclusion owed little or nothing to her youth, her beauty, or her peculiar talents (except inasmuch as lucky girls might be expected to be young, beautiful, and peculiarly talented), or her association with Huron, who was likewise considered lucky (with greater justice, given his record). It was more invisible than that, an ancient pagan quality, often bestowed only fleetingly. Yet with these two aboard, they could hardly avoid having a successful cruise, and they set to their work with a will.
Loralynn Kennakris 2: The Morning Which Breaks Page 24