by David Weber
No. It had surely just been banter.
Because he couldn’t know. There was absolutely no way he could know.
* * *
“Acceleration, two point zero KPS squared,” Commander Woodburn reported. “All systems showing green.”
“Acknowledged,” Captain Clegg said formally. “Keep an eye on the forward sensors. They seemed a bit twitchy during the last trial run.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Woodburn said. “At least the Beta nodes seem to have settled down. Jeffrey did good work there.”
“It’s Commander Norris’s job to do good work.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Travis saw Woodburn wince. “Yes, Ma’am.”
Mentally, Travis shook his head. The officers and crew were trying, in most cases trying very hard. But Clegg wasn’t making it easy on them.
Part of it was the stress of taking over command of a ship with a largely established crew, of course. Travis had seen that plenty of times in his career, and it was always a bit bumpy.
But more than that was the chip she seemed to have permanently bonded to her shoulder. Which in turn, he suspected, was probably due to of the presence and secret authority of Travis and Chomps.
To be honest, her skepticism might well be justified. Travis couldn’t speak for Chomps, but after a mere six weeks of training he felt wholly unprepared for this job.
But then, why shouldn’t he? Not only was this new territory for Travis, it was new territory for the Star Kingdom as a whole.
As a boy, he’d read occasional novels about Solarian League Special Agents: spies, counterspies, intrigue, danger, action—the whole gamut. But those had been stories. This was real. And whatever he did, or whatever he failed to do, there would be real-world consequences for his star nation and his people.
He had six weeks of training. He had Chomps. He had a trunkful of specialized equipment. And he had a senior officer cadre that was ambivalent, and a captain who was openly antagonistic.
Two and a half months to Silesia, followed by however long it took to track down Tamerlane, followed by another long trip home.
And no Lisa the whole time.
Silently, Travis let out a sigh. It was going to be a very long tour.
* * *
“Acceleration one point six five KPS squared,” Lisa reported. “All systems showing green.”
“Acknowledged,” Captain Marcello said. “So, XO. How does it feel to be back in space?”
“It feels wonderful, Sir,” Lisa said, glancing around. Damocles bridge. It was literally like coming home again.
“Our gain is certainly MPARS’s loss,” Marcello said dryly. “I’m told you did a fine job at the Academy.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Sir,” Lisa demurred. “Fair to middling at best.”
“Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but I have to agree with the Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Wanda Ravel, the new Tactical Officer, spoke up diffidently. “I have a nephew who was in one of your classes. He said you did an exemplary job.”
“See?” Marcello said, gesturing back toward Ravel. “I told you. As I always say, quality rises to the top.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Lisa said, smiling as she threw a sideways look at Ravel. The woman was a new addition to Damocles’s bridge: formerly Assistant Tactical Officer on HMS Salamander, she’d been transferred to Damocles to fill Lisa’s previous position.
The woman was playing it cautious, Lisa could tell, still a bit uncertain of where she fit into the camaraderie of a long-established crew. But she was already far more relaxed than Lisa herself had been when she first came aboard. She would do fine.
The real question was how well Lisa herself was going to do.
Executive Officer. It was a slot every Navy officer eagerly looked forward to: the last step on the way to commanding a ship. And if anecdotal evidence was to be believed, not a single officer ever felt quite ready to take on the job.
But she would make it. She had a captain who trusted her, officers and crew who respected her, and long T-years’ worth of training and experience under her belt.
And she had four and a half months before they reached Haven. Four and a half months in hyperspace in which to settle into the job.
True, it would be year or more before she saw Travis again, and that was a depressing thought. But it was really the only downside to this whole thing.
She smiled to herself. This was going to be a good tour.
* * *
In perfect synch—near perfect, anyway—the two Volsung battlecruisers and six heavy cruisers translated up into the Alpha band.
In the center of the formation, tucked away neatly between the battlecruisers, was Banshee.
“Llyn?” Gensonne’s voice crackled over the speaker. “Everything all right there?”
“Everything’s fine, Admiral,” Llyn assured him. “Nice translation, by the way. Well-coordinated.”
“I don’t know why you’d expect anything less,” Gensonne said with obvious pride. “We’re going to open up the formation a little. You just stay put—we’ll spread out around you.
Llyn smiled tightly. In other words, Gensonne still harbored the suspicion that Llyn was going to cut and run at the first opportunity, leaving the Volsungs to head to Danak alone. Wrapping him up in the center of the formation was the admiral’s unsubtle way of dissuading him from such thoughts.
A completely pointless exercise. A senior Axelrod agent would never simply cut and run. Especially not when the plan was going smoothly.
And this plan was going very smoothly. Four weeks ago Pacemaker had left for Haven, carrying both the message Gensonne thought Captain Katura was going to deliver to Danak and the message Katura was actually going to deliver. Three days ago, Shrike had completed its invisible hyperbolic drift through the Walther system and past the hyper limit, and was even now proceeding to make contact with a small Black Ops force which should be gathering for another mission. Llyn had been involved in the early planning stages for that one, and while it had been years in the making it could probably afford to pause long enough to deal with the Volsung base. That would ultimately be the local Axelrod agent’s call, but Llyn was pretty sure the data he’d sent would make a compelling case.
The final die was cast. The game was in motion. In five and a half months, when Gensonne’s fleet reached Danak, the Volsungs would be destroyed.
And best of all, Llyn’s work was essentially done. All he had to do now was sit back and enjoy the show.
He smiled to himself. This was going to be an excellent tour.
BOOK THREE
1544 PD
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jacques Corlain was a big bluff, round-faced man with a hearty laugh, who was currently single but had left two ex-wives in his wake. Like Joshua Miller he was a member of Parliament. Unlike Joshua—
Elizabeth smiled politely at the man across the table as he hit the punch line of his latest story. Unlike Joshua, pretty much everything.
Miller was quiet and observant. Corlain was casually domineering and seemed mostly to focus on himself, to the point where he hadn’t even noticed when Elizabeth set her napkin on her lap. Miller had a quick, concise mind, and had talked about himself only to the extent of answering his Queen’s questions. Corlain took forever to get to a point and would launch into a story or belabor a fact about his life at the drop of a fork. Miller was a staunch supporter of the Crown. Corlain seemed to have run for Parliament solely for the purpose of having a permanent platform for bashing two or three of the Lords he’d locked horns with over the years.
And whereas Elizabeth would be more than happy to invite Miller to another lunch, she had no intention of ever again eating at the same table with Corlain. His casual approach to talking with his mouth full alone guaranteed that.
The dessert was long gone by the time he finished his final, somewhat pointless story. “And now, I really should get back to Parliament,” he said, brushing off his mouth and setting his napk
in beside his plate. At least he hadn’t simply dropped or thrown it. “We’ve got an appropriations vote coming up, and there’s no way I’m letting them simply kick it up to the Lords and take the rest of the afternoon off. The Constitution gives the Commons some say in these things, and by Go—by thunder, we need to take that responsibility seriously.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Corlain,” Elizabeth said politely, though the thought of being trapped in the Commons through one of his speeches threatened to curdle the milk in her tea. “I’ve noticed that many of your colleagues seem to enjoy the privileges of being an MP without wanting to perform the associated work.”
“Way too many of them,” Corlain agreed. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty, I’m working on them.” He paused, his forehead wrinkling. “I guess I just leave now?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Elizabeth confirmed with her final courteous smile of the afternoon. “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for feeding me, Your Majesty,” Corlain replied, getting to his feet and bowing to her. “Someone will show me out, right?”
“There’s a guard waiting outside the dining room.”
“Right.” Corlain’s eyes flicked over her shoulder, and he bowed again. “Thank you again, Your Majesty. Maybe I can return the favor at the Commons dining room someday.”
“Perhaps,” Elizabeth said. “Good afternoon, Mr. Corlain.”
She waited two minutes after he left, just in case he’d buttonholed someone outside the door and had stopped to deliver one final story. Then, with a sigh, she stood up and headed for the door.
Adler and Penescu were waiting with their usual quiet all-but-invisibility. “Any messages come in while we were eating?” she asked as she came up to them.
“Nothing that would justify interrupting you for, Your Majesty,” Penescu said. He looked sideways at Adler. “Believe me, we tried to find one.”
“I appreciate that,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “But as I told Mr. Corlain, there are certain tasks that come with positions of authority. This was one of mine.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Adler said. But her eyes seemed troubled as they flicked to the far end of the table and Corlain’s discarded napkin. “May I ask, Your Majesty, how many more of these you’re planning to do?”
“Are you concerned about my security?” Elizabeth asked mildly.
“No, Your Majesty,” Adler said. “Just—” she pursed her lips, apparently wondering how far even a close bodyguard dared to go “—just your sanity.”
“Oh, come now,” Elizabeth chided. “Most of them haven’t been that bad.”
Still, Adler had a point. She’d been working her way through Burgundy’s list as slowly as she could reasonably do so, pretending she was ruminating and thinking deep thoughts, but actually simply stalling her way through the process while she worked on another solution. On the surface, she supposed, the chronic hesitation could be interpreted as having been caused by stress.
“No, most of them haven’t, Your Majesty,” Penescu said. “But if I may be so bold, Sergeant Adler has a point. Our job is to protect you, and Colonel Jackson has always maintained that protection includes more than just your physical safety.”
“The Colonel is probably right,” Elizabeth said. “Don’t worry, this was the last one.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Penescu said. “Where to?”
“My office.”
Because unfortunately, a Queen’s duties weren’t limited to entertaining potential suitors in order to satisfy the demands of a sixty-T-year-old document whose creators clearly hadn’t thought it through.
She’d had private meetings with some of those creators over the past few weeks, sometimes asking their opinions, sometimes verbally punching them in the arm for causing her so much grief. It had been interesting, but had led nowhere.
Meanwhile, there was also a lot of datawork to slog through.
“Prime Minister Harwich will be coming by at four to report on the Navy funding debate,” she told her guards as they walked down the ornate hallway leading to her office. “After Breakwater’s news channel interview last night, I’m guessing the debate will be a lively one. Please make sure the chef has some of those turnovers His Lordship likes to go along with his tea. He’ll probably need them.”
* * *
“We are, of course, pleased to welcome a representative of Her Majesty’s government to Saginaw,” Governor Karl Olbrycht said, his voice and face about equally strained. “All the same, I have to say that this is extremely irregular. One doesn’t drop by a foreign system without at least a modicum of advance notice.”
“This is your advance notice, Governor,” Clegg said, fiddling uselessly with the controls of her day cabin’s com display. At Casey’s current distance from the planet Olbrycht’s transmission was a bit sketchy anyway, and ever since the refit the feed from the bridge had consistently had problems.
But there was privacy here that the bridge didn’t afford. Travis wasn’t sure why Chomps had insisted on that kind of seclusion, but he’d been willing to bow to the other’s gut and more extensive training.
Clegg wasn’t nearly so happy with the suggestion. But at least she hadn’t argued the point. Much.
She also hadn’t argued against Travis, Chomps, and Hauptman being in here with her. But she hadn’t been happy about that, either.
“We’re still six hours out,” she continued, “plus probably another two while we settle into orbit and secure from the long voyage. Plenty of time for you to arrange whatever entry formalities you think necessary.”
There was a short time delay—“That’s not really the point, Captain,” Olbrycht protested. “We need to arrange the proper meetings, dinners, and events. It’s not every day that we get a visitor from outside the Confederacy.”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Clegg agreed. “But it’s really not necessary. We’re mostly here to talk to your ship people: builders, equippers, shippers, and possibly some members of your Navy.”
“Really,” Olbrycht said, his voice cooling noticeably. “May I ask why exactly you want to examine them?”
“I said I wanted to talk to them, not examine them,” Clegg said with clearly strained patience. “Queen Elizabeth is starting to upgrade and expand the Manticoran shipbuilding business, and we’re here to see what kind of ships the Silesian Confederacy might be interested in ordering from us.”
“I hardly think we would need to go all the way to Manticore to purchase ships,” Olbrycht said. “We have three such facilities of our own within our borders.”
“But nothing with its own impeller fabricators,” Hauptman put in, floating up beside Clegg. “Within a couple of years, that’s a service Manticore may be able to provide.”
Olbrycht peered owlishly at him. “And you are?”
“Heinreich Hauptman,” Hauptman identified himself. “I’ve done a bit of business with Ms. Simone Sei and her Eiderdown Cocoon Ship Systems. Enviro stuff, mostly, but I’ve also bought some of their food-prep equipment. My employer, Countess Barbara Acton, is using them on her long-range freighters and some of her new mining ships.”
Olbrycht’s eyes had dropped to something off-screen after Hauptman identified himself, probably checking his database. Now, he looked up again.
“Yes—Mr. Hauptman,” he said, his frown clearing and his voice regaining its earlier warmth. “Ms. Sei has mentioned you, very favorably, I might add. Her reports indicate you gave her a few suggestions that have markedly improved Eiderdown Cocoon’s product line.”
“One or two suggestions only, Governor,” Hauptman corrected modestly. “I’m looking forward to actually meeting her. It’s the main reason I asked Captain Clegg to make Saginaw the first stop on our tour.”
“I’m sure we can arrange a meeting,” Olbrycht said. “And perhaps a tour of Eiderdown Cocoon, if you have time.”
“I would love a tour,” Hauptman said. “Perhaps my colleagues and I can do that while Captain Clegg discusses
possibilities with the representatives from the Navy.”
“I think that would be possible,” Olbrycht said, his eyes going back to Clegg. “Though again, I really don’t think we’re in the market for imported warships.”
“Perhaps a look at Casey’s capabilities will change your mind,” Clegg said. “I presume that we’re now cleared for approach?”
“Yes, of course, Captain,” Olbrycht said. “We’ll look forward to seeing you. And I’ll be sure to contact Ms. Sei on your behalf, Mr. Hauptman.”
“Thank you, Governor,” Hauptman said. He looked at Clegg, his eyebrows raised in silent question.
To Travis’s mild surprise, Clegg took the cue and the implied order without argument. “We’ll see you in a few hours, then, Governor. Casey out.” She slapped the key that cut off the com.
“I think we’re in,” Hauptman said, turning to Travis and Chomps. “First thing—”
“Before we go any farther,” Clegg interrupted, “I’d like a little amplification on these suggestions Olbrycht says you gave this Simone Sei person.”
“Oh, calm down, Captain,” Hauptman said, his smooth cultured voice of a moment ago switching back to his usual gruffness. No matter how often Travis heard the transformation, it never ceased to startle him. “I didn’t give away any trade secrets. Certainly nothing the Star Kingdom has claim to. They were just a few thoughts on how to modify the shape of a component or two to better fit the space we wanted to put them into.”
“How about our manufacturers?” Clegg countered. “We make some of that same stuff, you know. Did you give them the same suggestions?”
“I tried,” Hauptman said stiffly. “No one was interested.” His lip twitched. “Though to be fair, that wasn’t entirely their fault,” he added in a slightly less argumentative tone. “Most of Manticore’s production line goes to Navy and ore processing ships. Miners and freighters have different requirements.”
“I think the bottom line here, Captain,” Chomps cut in, “is that we’ve got the openings we wanted. You, Commander Woodburn, and Commander Norris will have an opportunity to be wined and dined by Governor Olbrycht and his cronies, while Commander Long, Mr. Hauptman, and I will get access to Sei’s factory and records.”