“Pocked hulls!” swore the perfectly groomed, clinically handsome and impeccably dressed Fleet Support Officer. He switched off the Omni, still clutching the offending memo.
“Pocked hulls and overheated drives!” He had always been proud of using the same obscenities as battle-hardened Fleet personnel.
On the far side of an office specifically designed to instill a feeling of confidence and professionalism in any visitor, the three-dimensional image of Crag Courage, Fleet Captain, and his radiantly beautiful Executive Officer, Lieutenant Amethyst, obediently disappeared. They had just finished thwarting the extravagantly evil (and after three seasons in the top of the ratings), infamous pirate Mac Niphe. In doing so, they just happened to recover the entire Alliance treasury, so saving all from ultimate destruction for the one hundred and seventeenth time.
Lieutenant Commander Guilliame Kanard was proud of Crag Courage. The show had been one of his first successes as public relations coordinator for the Fleet. The animated robot of Courage on his desk had been presented to him by the grateful network in a ceremony attended by no less than four admirals.
Gill was also quite familiar with unreasonable demands. If the situation didn’t call for a miracle, the brass rarely resorted to the Sentient Relations and Communications Division.
The rambling memo could be summarized in two sentences, though no Fleet clerk would stoop to such directness:
1) The Khalian situation was rapidly developing into a full-scale war.
That was fine with Gill, in port and comfortably far from the frontiers where the trouble was occurring. Wars were much easier to sell than the routine dullness that normally characterized the activities of the Fleet’s ten thousand plus ships. But—
2) Commander Kanard was to prepare a public relations campaign to support the major tax increase which would be requested of the Alliance Council.
No wonder all the Admiral’s personal staffs were passing along this hissing grenade. A tax increase? Talk about a no-win situation. If Gill succeeded, then taxes went up and no one would be happy. If he failed, he’d be lucky to find a job doing PR for a Vegan whorehouse.
For several seconds Gill Kanard sat, randomly shuffling printouts. His thoughts raced, seeking a winning solution to an impossible situation. There simply was none. Gill’s finely trained mind carefully traced the ramifications, personal, and career, of the order. In less than a minute he had traced the nine most probable result-paths to their conclusions. In all nine he ended up beached and abandoned with his carefully choreographed career in ruins. In one scenario he was actually lynched by a mob of irate taxpayers.
Bitterness edged in and tainted Gill’s growing despair. Tax increase projects were the fusion bombs of office politics. Someone wanted very badly to get him.
Then he noticed a short note, on the back of the memo. Just one line on the back of the second page.
Gill, this one’s for real. Duane.
A faint smile crept onto the PR officer’s face. In four words Admiral Duane, one of the few true fighting admirals left in the Fleet bureaucracy, had changed everything.
This was not just another Fleet attempt to extend its influence or buy more toys for the brass to play with. Nor was it a trap laid by a jealous colleague. If Duane thought so, then this was indeed the start of a real shooting war.
The side of him that believed in Crag Courage crept out from behind a carefully schooled veneer of professional detachment. For a surprisingly long time Gill Kanard toyed with the novel sensation that he was doing something desirable. Finally, smiling broadly now, he slid his chair across the room and placed himself in the center of one of Port’s most impressive arrays of communications and computer controls.
He erased notes on the project he had been struggling with, an attempt to convince the notoriously obtuse residents of some mudball named Freeborn that joining the Alliance had been a good decision, despite the recent bout of inflation it had caused.
Approaching the problem logically, Gill decided to start at the beginning. In a few deft keystrokes he called up the earliest records relating to the Khalia. They were surprisingly old.