by David Weber
A sudden, muted klaxon cut off his grousing. “Got a malfunction,” Jones called tautly from her autocannon station, hunching over her board.
“Well, fix it,” the supervisor said.
“I’m trying,” Jones snapped, her hands fumbling with the settings. “They’re not responding.”
“Should we pitch wedge?” the student at the sensor station asked, looking at the supervisor.
“I don’t know,” the supervisor countered. “Should you?”
“There’s no time,” the commander ground out. “Jones—”
“Got it,” Jones cut him off. The red section of the status grid returned to green—
The klaxon cut off, its raucous noise replaced with hardly a missed beat by the equally disagreeable chatter of the autocannon. But at least that particular noise meant the ship and crew were still alive.
At least for the moment. Travis shifted his attention back to the remaining missile—
And felt his mouth drop open. The missile was no longer following its burn-out vector toward the starboard sidewall. Instead, it had inexplicably and impossibly changed course, weaving a convoluted wiggle toward a point clear of the sidewall and straight down the ship’s throat.
The command midshipman apparently spotted it the same time Travis did.
“Jones!” he barked.
“I see it,” she snarled. “What the hell—?”
She never finished the sentence. An instant later every display, status grid, and control board flared pure white and then went dark.
“Congratulations, Midshipmen,” the supervisor said into the stunned silence. “You’re all dead.”
For a couple of seconds the image remained, the midshipmen staring in disbelief or chagrin at their boards or their own simulation displays, the supervisor busily and calmly making notes on his tablet. Then, Matayoshi reached to a wall control board and tapped a switch. The display blanked and the speaker went silent, leaving only the repeater tactical readout still operating.
“Well, spacers,” the petty officer said. “What have we learned today?”
“I don’t understand, Sir,” one of the students, Geoffrey Smith said, sounding bewildered. “That missile was dead. It was, wasn’t it, Kelderman?”
“That’s what the sensors said,” one of the other students confirmed. “Its wedge had burned out.” She sent a puzzled frown at Matayoshi. “Unless Bogey Two shut off the wedge before it burned out and then turned it back on?”
“They can’t,” Travis murmured to Chomps.
“You say something, Long?” Matayoshi demanded.
Travis winced. He thought he’d spoken too softly for Matayoshi to hear. Clearly, he’d been wrong.
“My apologies, Fire Control Specialist Matayoshi,” he said.
“I didn’t ask for an apology, Long,” Matayoshi growled. “I asked what you said.”
Travis braced himself.
“I was just telling Spacer Townsend that it’s not possible to turn a missile wedge off and then on again. Missiles have only two settings, and both of them run the wedge until the impellers are gone.”
“Why is that?”
“Trying to shut down a missile’s wedge en route would start a feedback loop that would burn the impellers out right there and then,” Travis said.
“What if the impellers were shielded?” Smith asked.
“Shielded how?” Travis countered. “And against what? Themselves?”
“Spacer Long is right,” Matayoshi said. “But only as far as he goes. You’re all thinking inside the lines, and an enemy’s lines may be in different places than yours are. They could have different tech or battle doctrine, and either of those can throw off your assumptions. So. If you can’t just shut off a missile wedge, what else could it have been?”
The students looked at each other. “It wasn’t shielding another missile,” Kelderman said slowly. “We would have seen the edge on the gravitics display. So . . .”
“Two separate wedges?” Chomps suggested hesitantly. “One lighting up after the other burned out?”
“No,” Travis said. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it?” Matayoshi asked, a sly twinkle in his eye.
“No, he’s right—it makes sense,” Smith said. Out of the corner of his eye, Travis saw Kelderman step to the wall control and start cycling through the different pages on the sensor display history. “Warships have two impeller rings,” Smith continued. “Why not a missile?”
“Because it’s too small—” Travis began.
“Son of a bitch,” Kelderman said. She looked guiltily at Matayoshi. “Sorry, Petty Officer.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Matayoshi assured her. “You find something?”
“Yes.” Kelderman gestured to the display. “Townsend was right. There were two separate wedges on that missile.”
“That’s impossible,” Travis repeated.
“Take a look,” Matayoshi offered, waving at the display. “It’s right there. Read and weep.”
“It’s a simulation, Fire Control Specialist,” Travis pointed out stiffly. “You could put flying dragons into a simulation if you wanted to. But that wouldn’t make it right.”
“You have a problem with an exercise that stretches people’s minds, Spacer Long? You want life in the Navy to be easy and predictable?”
The observation room had gone very quiet. Matayoshi was glaring at Travis, the twinkle long since vanished from his eye. Osterman was studying Travis with a less hostile but hardly friendly expression. Chomps looked interested and slightly amused by the direction the conversation had taken. Everyone else looked like they were desperately hoping Matayoshi would forget any of them were there.
“I don’t see how it serves proper training to suggest that the impossible can happen, Fire Control Specialist,” Travis said as calmly as he could. “I think that would encourage us to waste time and energy looking in useless directions instead of concentrating on the possible. Unlikely or unexpected, but still possible.”
“Quite a speech, Spacer Long,” Matayoshi said stiffly. “Been practicing it?”
“He just has a knack,” Chomps muttered.
“You don’t think impossible problems are a proper teaching method?” Matayoshi demanded, ignoring Chomps’s comment.
“That depends, Fire Control Specialist,” Travis said feeling sweat breaking out on his forehead. What had started out as an objection on purely technical grounds had somehow morphed into a debate on Casey-Rosewood’s teaching doctrine. “If students are being graded on how they react to a situation, either individually or a team, that would certainly be legitimate. But if they’re being graded on how they deal with an impossible scenario, I would question the propriety.”
“I see.” For a long moment Matayoshi stared at him. “In that case, Spacer Third Class Long, since we clearly have an impasse here, I suggest you take it to higher authority. Lieutenant Cyrus should still be in his office. Report to him immediately and explain the situation.”
Travis winced. Once again, he’d managed to step right into it. “Yes, Fire Control Specialist.”
“And be sure you tell him exactly why a two-stage missile is impossible,” Matayoshi added. “Osterman, kindly escort Spacer Long out of my sight.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“As for the rest of you,” Matayoshi added, turning back to the silent spacers, “we’ll be heading back to class and running through the exercise minute by minute. As we do, you’ll tell me exactly where everyone in there screwed up.”
Cyrus hadn’t seen Spacer Travis Long, or endured any of his pedantic complaints, for over two weeks. He hadn’t missed those visits, either.
Still, dealing with student questions was part of his job, and at least Long knew how to get to his point quickly and coherently. He’d handled Long’s previous complaints with professionalism, and he had no doubt he could do the same this particular evening.
Until, that was, he learned the topic of Long’s latest tirade.<
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“No,” Cyrus said flatly, years of practice enabling him to hold onto his temper. “There is no physical reason such a missile couldn’t be built. None.”
“I believe there is, Sir,” Long said, his voice respectful but firm. “Two impeller rings at such close proximity can’t avoid bleeding control flickers and capillary fields between them. The fact that the secondary set isn’t yet active doesn’t matter—it’ll still be misaligned when it does light up.”
“Then you shield the second set,” Cyrus bit out. “You put something between the two rings to keep that from happening.”
“You can’t, sir,” Long insisted doggedly. “It’s a quantum tunneling effect. No known material or counterfield can block or suppress it. You’d need a good hundred meters of distance between the rings, which would either require an acceleration-resistant pylon that’s physically impossible to construct with any known material, or else a much thicker pillar that will jump the costs with every square centimeter of cross-section that you add. The missile would end up as big as a corvette and as expensive as a destroyer. Either way, it would not show up on sensors as a normal missile. Not the way it did on the simulation.”
Cyrus ground his teeth. The dual-stage missile had been his hobby and his obsession for nearly seven years, and he’d been nagging at the Navy to pick up the project for the last five of those years. Bad enough when some unimaginative tech told him the thing was impossible; but for a snot-nosed spacer third class to lecture him was the final straw. “Well, maybe you should write the definitive paper on impeller node interactions and instabilities,” he ground out.
“Actually, it’s already been written, sir,” Long said. “About twenty years ago. A monograph by the Solarian League physicist—”
“Then you need to write the definitive Manticoran one,” Cyrus snapped. “Fifty pages, minimum, on my desk by Friday.”
He had the satisfaction of seeing Long’s eyes widen in shock and disbelief. “Sir?” the kid breathed.
“Dismissed, Spacer Long.” Swiveling his chair halfway around, Cyrus picked up his tablet and punched up a random report.
Then watched out of the corner of his eye as Long squared his shoulders, executed a passable about-face, and left the office.
Cyrus dropped the tablet back on his desk with a muttered curse. The kid was gone now, but he’d be back. He’d be back with yet more complaints, arguments, or lectures. Not to mention the fifty-page analysis that Cyrus had ordered in the ill-advised heat of the moment.
And since the report would be on record, he would now have to read it. Every damn word of it.
And suddenly, Cyrus decided he was tired of Spacer Long.
He picked up his uni-link, turning it over in his hands while he worked out a plan. Stockmann, he decided. The petty officer was probably as tired of hearing Long’s voice in impeller class as Cyrus was of hearing that voice in his office. Besides, Stockmann owed Cyrus a favor.
On second thought, this probably shouldn’t go over the airwaves.
He tucked the uni-link away. Tomorrow after lunch, he decided. He’d grab Stockmann right after lunch and lay it out for him.
And if all went well, by the beginning of next week Long would be out of his hair. Forever.
The room behind the plain wooden door was referred to by the palace staff as the Royal Sanctum, and as a boy Edward Winton could remember spending hours wondering what his grandmother Queen Elizabeth was doing in that mysterious chamber. Not until he reached the age of twenty-one T-years did she allow him inside, where he discovered somewhat to his disappointment that the Sanctum was merely a private office where she went whenever she wanted to concentrate on work without the nuisance of calls or visitors. By the time Edward’s father Michael ascended the throne the Sanctum had long since lost its original air of mystique.
Still, as Edward had worked his way up through the ranks of the Royal Manticoran Navy the idea of having a place all to yourself took on a greater allure than any of his childhood imaginings could ever have achieved.
He’d been waiting in the Sanctum for nearly an hour, alternating his attention between the paintings on the walls and the workload on his tablet, when the King finally arrived.
“Ah—there you are,” Michael huffed as he strode into the room, closing the door behind him.
“Didn’t you get the message that I’d wait for you here?” Edward asked, standing up as he ran a critical eye over his father’s face.
What he saw shocked him. He’d known that eight years of kingship had been hard on the other, but he hadn’t realized just how much punishment those eight years had delivered. Michael’s face was deeply lined, the skin sagging, the eyes tired and with an air of lost-child about them. Below the weary face was a weary body, shoulders slumped, legs slightly stiffened, feet shuffling across the deep carpet.
“I never trust messages to adequately foretell the future,” Michael said, giving his son a quick handshake. “Especially when the sender is not his own master. You’re looking good, Edward.”
“You’re looking kingly, Dad,” Edward replied, suppressing the reflexive surge of annoyance. Twenty-two T-years in the Navy, and he was still getting oblique grief from his father over that decision.
“In other words, I look like flash-frozen hell?” Michael suggested with a small smile.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Let’s sit, shall we?” Carefully, or so it seemed to Edward, the King sat down on the couch. Edward sat down beside him. “So what brings you to Landing?” Michael continued. “No—let me guess. Breakwater’s Ugly Duckling project?”
Edward blinked. “His what?”
“Sorry,” Michael said with another smile, a more genuine one this time. “One of the many private nicknames floating around Parliament and the RMN. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard that one.”
“Sorry—no nicknames have reached us out there yet.”
“Too bad,” Michael said. “Some of them are quite imaginative. My personal favorite is sloop du jour. All rather beside the point, I suppose. That is why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Edward confirmed. Once upon a time, he remembered, his father had been better at small talk and not so blunt and focused. Part of the price of kingship? “A former colleague asked if I would talk to you about it.”
“Not much to talk about, I’m afraid,” Michael said. “I think it’s a mistake, too. But there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”
“Are you sure?” Edward pressed. “You are the King. That has to count for something.”
“It counts for a great deal,” Michael said ruefully. “Or it counts for nothing at all, depending on the situation. This is one of the latter. I spent all the political capital I could and still came up short. For whatever reason, this idea has fired Parliament’s imagination, and there’s no way to quench that flame. The best I can do—the best we have done—is to keep the project focused on a single battlecruiser until we see how it turns out.”
Edward snorted.
“That one’s just common sense,” he said, “which appears to be in short supply these days. Just because we haven’t had a battle in a hundred years doesn’t mean the Navy hasn’t been vital to our defense. We may never know how many groups like the Brotherhood took a look at Victory and Vanguard and Invincible and decided to go after easier prey.”
“I agree,” Michael said. “The problem is that we won’t ever know that, and a lack of data never wins debates. Meanwhile, there are many other worthy groups and causes clamoring for money and people, and even with the immigration program it’s going to be a long time before we have enough warm bodies to satisfy all our needs.”
“In that case, why not just leave Mars and the other battlecruisers where they are?” Edward asked. “They’re not costing a damn thing sitting out in orbit except for whatever it takes to run the caretaker crew.”
“You’re missing the political nuances,” Michael said heavily. “On the surfa
ce is the fact that the new sloops will be in MPARS under the Exchequer’s jurisdiction. Slightly deeper than that is the fact that many of the people working on the project are Breakwater’s friends and colleagues. Getting government money is always good for one’s prestige.”
“And for the future trading of favors.”
“The chief form of political currency,” Michael agreed. “But there’s one more layer to Breakwater’s thinking. I think he suspects that the Navy is quietly stripping those battlecruisers of the parts and equipment necessary for keeping the other ships flying. I think the Mars plan is the first step in his attempt to cut off that supply.”
Edward felt a curse bubbling at his lips. Like cutting the last bit of fat off a starving man in order to make him starve that much faster.
“I always knew he was a bastard,” he said. “I never realized just how big a bastard he was.”
“He doesn’t like the Navy,” Michael said. “Never has. And frankly, I can understand his point of view. The RMN costs money and people, and at the moment has no real use.”
“At the moment, maybe,” Edward said. “What Breakwater fails to appreciate is that a military is like a counter-grav backpack. If you ever need one, and don’t have it, you’re dead.”
“Agreed,” Michael said. “And we will need it someday. The situation at New Berlin shows that there are still powerful and potentially unfriendly forces out there.” He sighed. “You know, Edward, sometimes I think the board made a serious mistake in recasting Manticore as a kingdom. There’s something about titles and a division of the citizenry between nobles and commoners that affects people’s brains. A rich and well-connected man or woman has a certain level of power, but they’re still just people. You make that Earl Rich Man or Countess Well-Connected Woman, and suddenly everyone sees them differently.”
“Including themselves.”
“Especially themselves,” Michael said ruefully. “And make a man king . . . well, that’s even more problematic.”
“I suppose,” Edward said carefully, an odd tingle running through him. It was no secret in the family that his father had never particularly liked being king. But that was a far cry from wishing the Star Kingdom had never been born. “So you’re thinking we ought to go back to Manticore, Limited?”