CHAPTER SIX
Seven days later, Aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
26 February 2134 (ten days after Incident Seventeen,
1946 light-years from Destination)
Mikko Running Deer stepped back from the shower of sparks as a machinist mate from engineering put the finishing touches on the composite alloy pipes in the renovated storage compartment.
“The first hydroponics compartment is already hydrated and we have soy growing there,” Lieutenant Rosemary Acho, the logistics officer, explained. “This compartment should be up and running by the mid-watch tomorrow. More soy here, but when we clear a third compartment we’re going to grow some different plants, tomatoes, probably. They grow fast.”
Mikko looked over the clusters of water pipes and the six separate clear tanks inside.
“Engineering did a good job fabricating the clear composites,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am, once we got Lieutenant Ma moving on it. I figure we can stretch our human rations by another month, maybe six weeks, if all three of these chambers produce like they should. Um . . . there’s something else I’d like to bring up, XO. I found a shipment we’re carrying for transfer to Fleet Base Akaampta.”
“The Cottohazz combined operations base?” Mikko asked.
“Yes, Ma’am, although it’s US Navy property and consigned to the US ordnance holding facility there.”
“Okay, my curiosity is aroused. What is it?”
“A shipment of thirty-six deep-space intercept missiles,” Acho answered and looked down at her data pad. “Mark Fives, the new Block Six variants with the refitted laser pointers and with the Sunflower anti-missile option, the one the destroyer crews improvised in the war. It’s now hard-coded in.”
“Mark Fives?” Mikko said. “Aside from the four new General-class heavy cruisers, the only things that can shoot those are US Navy destroyers, and most of those are wrecks out around K’tok. There sure aren’t any of either at Akaampta. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, XO, that’s the Navy for you. I checked the supporting documentation. The shipment was ordered before the war, as advanced deployment of replacement munitions in case one of our heavy cruisers got tagged for joint Cottohazz operations. It looks like it’s been moving through the bureaucracy on autopilot ever since, except someone decided to substitute new production missiles. Now they’re in our hold.”
Mikko saw the possibilities. Cam Ranh Bay was technically an armed transport, but aside from the spinal coil gun for launching planetary bombardment munitions it had two small point defense lasers for anti-missile work, two larger dual-purpose lasers, and launchers for twelve older Mark Four deep-space intercept missiles. Thirty-six brand new Mark Fives would be a major augmentation to their anti-ship firepower.
The captain would like the fact that the idea came from Acho instead of her. It would show initiative, maybe even growing self-reliance. That conversation a week earlier still stung, but Mikko was trying to change.
“That smacks. Good work, LOG. The captain can requisition those for emergency use. You put together the paperwork and I’ll get his signature. Tell Lieutenant Alexander he has some new toys. That should excite him.”
Acho looked down and shook her head. “I already did, Ma’am. He says we can’t fire them. Wrong bore size for the coil gun.”
“That sounds like another job for engineering,” Mikko said.
“Lieutenant Ma wasn’t crazy about detaching part of his A gang to rig these hydroponics tanks. And the truth is, neither Lieutenant Alexander nor Ma have much use for me.” She looked up into Mikko’s eyes. “They’re reservists, with good jobs waiting for them once the emergency is over. They figure people who picked the Navy as a career did it because they couldn’t find anything better.”
“Be careful how wide you cast that net, Lieutenant. The captain’s a reservist, too.”
“He’s different, XO. Besides, they’ve all been to college, you too.”
“You’ve been to college, Acho. I’ve seen your personnel folder.”
“Navy sent me to technical school, ma’am. It’s not the same. I came up through the ranks. I may wear a white shipsuit now, but when they look at me they still see khaki.”
Mikko knew that much was true. There was no getting around it. Acho was ten years older than most of the other officers of her grade because she’d had a good career as a petty officer before being tapped for officer training. She didn’t have “polish,” didn’t get the literary references in some of the wardroom conversations, and so mostly kept quiet, although Mikko couldn’t see what “polish” had to do with getting the job done. Yes, there was an inescapable air of condescension in the way most of the other officers treated Rosemary Acho, but Mikko doubted she understood how quickly it would go away if she just wouldn’t embrace it like a martyr.
“I’ll talk to Alexander,” Mikko said, “get him moving on this with you and Ma, but you need to discharge that ballast and stand up for yourself, Rosemary. You’ve got more active duty time in uniform than both of those two put together. You know how to make things work and where to look for answers—like finding these Mark Fives buried in the cargo. You don’t need to apologize to anyone on this ship for who you are or how you got here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Acho said, without conviction.
“Look,” Lieutenant Alexander, the TAC boss, told Mikko an hour later, “we’re not a cruiser, okay? We’re a transport. There’s only so much firepower we can wring out of this tub.”
Mikko rubbed her temples, hoping her headache would go away. Of course, her current headache was mostly Lieutenant Homer Alexander.
“USS Cam Ranh Bay is an assault transport,” she said. “She’s not a cruiser, but she’s not a tub either and you better never let the captain hear you call her that. We’ve got a coil gun—”
“For launching bombardment munitions,” Alexander broke in. “Forty-centimeter bombardment munitions, not deep space intercept missiles.”
“I know that, TAC. But Lieutenant Acho—”
“Lieutenant Acho knows logistics, not ordnance,” he interrupted again. “She sees ‘missile’ on a shipping manifest and thinks she’s got something. But those Mark Five bad boys need a coil gun to fire and they won’t fit our coil gun. I can’t just wave my hands and make them fit.”
Bad boys? Mikko thought. And he said it with a sort of tough male swagger and a step toward her that made her fight against her rising anger. How much of this was just Alexander defending his turf as a testosterone-only zone? Maybe he’d forgotten that Captain Bitka’s old TAC boss on Puebla had been Marina Filipenko, and she’d managed to get the job done pretty well. Or maybe it was just that he hadn’t come up with the idea himself.
“Lieutenant Alexander, you interrupt me one more time and you will bitterly regret it. Do you read me?”
Alexander took a half step back.
“I . . . I’m sorry, Mikko. It’s just . . . TAC is my job. I take it really seriously.”
“Take it seriously?” Mikko said. “You know, Lieutenant, sometimes I just don’t get you. We’re going into the deep-deep black with no idea what we’re facing except they’re probably more advanced than we are and might not be friendly. The last thing we want is a fight, but if it comes to that, we’re going to need every edge we can get. Right now, our only credible anti-ship assets consist of the two dual-purpose lasers and exactly twelve Mark Four missiles. You’re the TAC boss, for crying out loud. I’d think you’d jump at the chance to add thirty-six Mark Fives to that. Instead I’m hearing excuses. What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Lieutenant Alexander’s eyes grew wider and she saw him color with either anger or embarrassment, she couldn’t tell which.
“What’s wrong? Look, I know my job, XO, but you’ve got to be realistic. Just wanting more firepower doesn’t make it happen.”
No, she knew wanting it didn’t make it happen. But working the problem did. There had to be a way to use these missiles. There had to be, and she knew she could figure it out and make it work. She wanted to. She wanted to drag Alexander and Acho to engineering, explain the problem to Ma, and beat the solution out of them if she had to, then give it to the captain, her present of thirty-six lethal additions to their armament suite.
But that was why these three couldn’t work it out on their own, wasn’t it? Because she always did it for them. She had done her best to change, to execute her job the way the captain wanted her to, and for days she had seen little bits of evidence like this that maybe he had been right.
“TAC, you and Lieutenant Acho get together with Lieutenant Ma and come up with a solution.”
“It’ll have to be later,” Alexander said. “Lieutenant Ma’s on watch right now.”
“I know. He’s duty engineering officer so you know right where to find him. Get Acho, go to engineering now, and do not come back until you three have figured out a way to make these missiles work.”
“How?”
“That’s your job, TAC. Build a goddamned catapult if you have to but make them work. Now go. Shoo!”
Watching Alexander stride away in obvious irritation, Mikko had to admit to a fairly unprofessional feeling of satisfaction.
Three hours later she was doing her afternoon routine on the resistance machines in the officers’ gym when Rosemary Acho pinged her again. She sounded upset when she asked Mikko to join her in her office. Mikko wiped the perspiration from her face with a towel and her first reaction was to refuse. She suspected this was just another complaint about the boys not treating her as an equal, although only an hour earlier they had submitted a joint plan to make the Mark Five missiles work: engineering was going to fabricate sabot sleeves around the missiles so they would fit their larger bore coil gun.
Something in Acho’s voice sounded different, though.
“What’s the problem, LOG?”
“The, uh . . . the Varoki trade delegate e-Lisyss and his assistant are here with some, um . . . recommendations concerning rations. I think this may be above my pay grade.”
Was that anger in her voice? No. Maybe disgust, but something else as well.
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Mikko said.
She unhooked the cooling feeds from her shipsuit, washed her face in the ’fresher, and thought through the possibilities for problems over rations on the way to Acho’s office, a quarter of the way around the habitat wheel.
Because the six species of the Cottohazz were independently evolved from different trees of life, their protein chains were different, as in incompatible, even poisonous to each other. But since transport vessels of all the navies of the member states of the Cottohazz might be called on to move almost anyone, all of them carried protein ration stocks for all six species. Cam Ranh Bay’s galley could put meals on tables for Humans, Varoki, Buran, Zaschaan, Katami, and Brand. The problem, she supposed, was that it was navy galley food, and the Bay’s cooks weren’t exactly experts in alien haute cuisine. The envoy e-Lisyss, like any other sentient being, probably had a lot going on inside him, but about all that Mikko had experienced so far was a sense of disappointed entitlement.
When she arrived, e-Lisyss and his assistant Haykuz were seated in chairs in front of Acho’s desk. The light glittered on their hairless, green-tinted, iridescent skin and she was again reminded of some sort of large, terrestrial lizard. Mikko wondered if their distant, primitive ancestors had had feathers, like dinosaurs. She remembered the nicknames Captain Bitka had given e-Lisyss and Haykuz that first day—Little Sis and Haiku—and she suppressed a smile. Acho stood when Mikko entered.
“XO, thank you for joining us.”
Neither of the Varoki stood, of course.
“What can I do to help?” She sat in the third chair in the office and Acho sat as well, but the logistics officer’s rigidly erect posture was a blueprint of tension.
“The envoy e-Lisyss has been sharing with me his concerns concerning rations.” Acho frowned, probably realizing the awkward phrasing betrayed her nervousness.
“I’m afraid a military transport doesn’t have the quality or variety of food the envoy is probably accustomed to,” Mikko said. “I wonder if there’s a Varoki on board who has some experience in cooking and who might help the galley staff with meal preparation.”
Acho shook her head. “No, it’s not about the quality of the food. It has to do with quantity.”
“We have more than enough protein in stock for the small number of Varoki on board,” Mikko said. “If portion size—”
“No, Lieutenant Running Deer,” the Varoki assistant Haykuz said, “the concern is not portion size for us. In fact, it is clear that we will still be alive after the entire Human crew has starved to death, which it will do in a little over four months by our calculation.”
“Lieutenant Acho has come up with some expedients to stretch that out a bit,” Mikko said. “But yes, that is our principle concern as well.”
“The Envoy’s mission for the Cottohazz is of the highest importance,” Haykuz explained. “It is essential that he survive to return, and he cannot do so without the Human crew of this starship remaining alive and functional.”
Mikko felt a shock of realization and then a rising throb of anger, but she pushed it back down. No. The son of a bitch couldn’t possibly mean that. He couldn’t be that big a son of a bitch, could he?
“As a member of that crew, I appreciate the value he places on us,” Mikko said and stood up. “Now, if that is all, I’ll—”
“No, it is not all,” Haykuz said and Mikko noticed for the first time his own flushed face, his own ears drooping and folded back, and the fact that he now looked down at the deck, refusing eye contact. Haykuz was an idiot and a toad, but at least he had decency enough to be ashamed of what he said next.
“There are many useless mouths among the Human passengers, who contribute nothing to our chances of survival. Hard decisions are required.”
So, he really was that big a son of a bitch. Humans were just servants and in a pinch, it made sense to only keep the really useful ones alive? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! Mikko thought. But she was XO. It was her job to solve problems, not make them worse. She tried to make her mind work coldly and logically, tried to formulate a response which would end this right here and keep anyone outside this room from knowing what had been said. Except the captain, of course. She would have to tell him. So what was it she wanted to be able to tell him she had said to these two?
“I will explain this to you and save you the humiliation of having the captain say it later. We are serving officers in the Navy of the United States of North America, and we are bound by its regulations, as well as by the laws of our nation, the joint covenants of the Cottohazz, and common decency. All of those make us responsible for the survival and wellbeing of every person in this ship, regardless of station or situation. They do not empower the captain to execute passengers on the off chance we might need some of their food later.
“Lieutenant Acho, you will not to repeat this conversation to anyone else on the ship.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am.”
“As for you, Mister Haykuz, I will never make a record of this conversation and so officially it will never have taken place. But if you or the envoy make this proposal directly to the captain I assure you it will become part of the official record of this voyage. For your own good I recommend you do not do that under any circumstances. Do you understand me?”
Still looking down, Haykuz did not move. e-Lisyss stared at a place on Acho’s office wall and then grunted a single syllable. Haykuz relaxed slightly.
“It is understood, Lieutenant Running Deer.”