Chapter Eleven
“This is bullshit!”
The Federation Navy commander kicked the trash bin built into the side of the turbo shaft car. He couldn’t put much power into it in the microgravity without breaking his other foot’s maglock to the car’s floor, but he seemed to get at least some satisfaction from it.
The shaft ran down the outer skin of TFNS Ishtar’s core hull, along the base of one of the six massive, flangelike ribs which carried the FTLC’s sublight parasites, and at the moment its only passengers were him and four other commanders of CruRon 1102. Their heavy cruisers were distributed between Ereshkigal and Gilgamesh, and this summons to the carrier division’s flagship was the first time they’d all seen each other since they’d been hauled back off Jalal Station.
“By all means, Stanley. Take it out on that poor, poor can,” one of his companions said, and the others chuckled.
“Piss off, Gao. You and Saint Elmo got into the fight later than my Changsha.” Commander Joseph Stanley anchored both boots to the deck one more as he crossed his arms so he could glower more ferociously. “I promised my spacers a proper shore leave once we cycled out. Jalal was a shitpot, but at least it wasn’t some kinetic’d wasteland on the way to a dust-choked ice age.”
“So they got pulled before they could go broke,” Abraham Whitten said. He was a burly man, blond hair stranded with early gray. “They worried all the booze and whores of the galaxy will be gone the next time they touch civilization? My boys and girls on the Austerlitz can drink, but not that much.”
“With the amount of alcohol my chief of the boat’s confiscated, that seems to be what my people were afraid of,” Elaina Iglesias, TFNS Maplplaquet’s CO, said. “Anyone else having that problem?”
“I’d be disappointed in my spacers if they didn’t try and smuggle anything,” Stanley replied. “We have a reputation to maintain. Fight hard, play hard.”
“So morale took a hit.” Vincent Gao shrugged. “It happens, and it’ll be worse when we get to Scotia. Won’t be any ‘rescue mission.’ It’ll be mass graves and PTSD cases for everyone who has to set down. Anyone ever been to a world hit by K-strikes?”
“I was on Nuevo Paso,” Whitten said. “I can still smell it before I fall asleep. Sometimes.”
“Who does Murphy think he is?” Stanley demanded. “I hope Captain Penski’s given him the ‘this is how things run in the real Navy’ spiel by now. Yanking spacers out of shore leave…That just isn’t done.”
“Murphy probably doesn’t know that,” Gao said. “He was Survey, after all.” The others snorted derisively, but Gao shrugged. “He does have a combat command under his belt, though. Took the bridge at some minor engagement after the rebels got the drop on his ship. Managed to pull out a win when he should’ve ended up as a statistic.”
“And he’s related to that Murphy,” Whitten said. “Which makes me worried that he thinks competence is hereditary. It’s not. In case anyone’s wondering.” He snorted again, more harshly. “As his own father demonstrated.”
“Murphy’s not the problem.” Iglesias yawned and stretched. “It’s his chief of staff, O’Hanraghty. Guy was an up-and-comer before he got on too many people’s bad side. Some intelligence operation that went to shit. Details aren’t exactly available.”
“So O’Hanraghty gloms onto Murphy to keep his career afloat, and Murphy’s just an empty suit.” Stanley raised a hand and looked around for agreement. “If that’s the case, then at least we know who we have to keep happy.”
“I doubt it’s that cut and dried,” Gao said. “Why’d Murphy volunteer for command out on the Fringe? Guy’s connected to all the right people back in the Heart. He could be eating grapes and having his feet rubbed by nubile women at any other assignment.”
“Ambitious? That’s all we need. Somebody playing war to up their profile in a board room.” Stanley shook his head. “Or is O’Hanraghty vying for something outside a Survey officer’s shadow? Guy should just resign his commission and reenlist under a fake name. He’d have better luck.”
“Murphy’s got his kid in tow,” Iglesias said. “Callum. He’s so new he squeaks.”
“Doubt some Heart World schmuck’s going to put his flesh and blood on the line for the pat on the back a tour out in New Dublin will amount to,” Stanley observed. “So we just salute and execute until the clock runs out. Fine. Better than going back to the meatgrinder in Beta Cygni.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Whitten said. “We can get shore leave on Crann Bethadh.”
“Place is Fringe,” Gao said. “Internal Affairs rates it high on the insurrection scale, too. It’s not exactly quality leave if you have to go down armed and in groups.”
“Exactly!” Stanley retorted. “Especially when we could still—”
He paused and looked up as a light panel flashed and a tone chimed.
“Warning,” a melodious recorded voice said. “Warning. Approaching spin section interface.”
The other passengers joined Stanley, with both feet maglocked to the car’s floor as it car began to slow. It stopped completely for a moment, then bumped hard as it locked to the face of the rotating personnel section and gravity abruptly reasserted itself.
“Especially when we could still be on Jalal,” Stanley resumed. “I had two doses of Teetotaler and a liver out of practice ready to go, damn it.”
“Boo-goddamn-hoo.” Gao straightened and moved to the door. “Game faces. We keep the brass happy, and it’ll be decent end-of-tour evaluations and a shot at a training command to finish out our service obligation.”
“Yup,” Iglesias said. “That’s why I went to the officer corps—to do the bare minimum and get out with my skin intact.”
“What?” Stanley elbowed her in the side. “You, too?”
“Stow it.” Whitten pointed down the passageway as the doors opened and they saw CruRon 1102’s CO and Commander Tsimmerman, his flag captain aboard La Cateau, waiting for them. “There’s Captain Penski. He’s a true believer.”
* * *
Stanley sat in a ready room chair, drumming his fingers as a holo-globe of Inverness spun slowly beside a lectern on a slightly elevated stage. Ishtar’s briefing area’s walls were lined with pictures of ships she’d carried through her quarter-century of continuous service. Several bore black “lost in action” ribbons across the upper left corners of their frames.
He looked over his shoulder to a small group of officers in the rows behind him, all in tight conversation.
“They’re taking this a bit seriously,” he said quietly to Gao.
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” his fellow CO said. “You think the League’s still in the system?”
“Hell, no. It was just another of their raids. Besides, they know how close Scotia is to our nodal base here at Jalal. They hang around and they’re just asking for it.”
“They cleaned our clock at Callao when they suckered Fourth Fleet into thinking just that,” Gao pointed out. “Which is why we generally won’t retake a system after the Leaguies hit it.”
“Somebody better tell Murphy or O’Hanraghty about that,” Stanley said. “I’d hate for my family to get a death notice saying ‘Oops, we fell for it again.’”
“You’re just a real ray of sunshine, Stanley—you know that?” Iglesias hissed. “Game face. There’s enlisted around and we have reputations to maintain.”
Stanley’s countenance became deadly serious and she rolled her eyes.
“It’s like I’m back in grade school. With the class dummies,” she muttered.
The door at the back of the stage opened before Stanley could reply and Rear Admiral Murphy, Captain O’Hanraghty, and Captain Drebin—who walked with slightly hunched shoulders—came through it.
“Task Force commander,” Captain Lowe announced, and the assembled officers came to their feet.
Stanley’s eyes hardened as they focused on Murphy, noting his single combat ribbon, unscuffed shoes, and a uniform tunic that looked like it had come off the printers just yesterday. That he shared the green command line down the side of Stanley’s own trousers made him almost physically ill.
“Be seated.” The words came from O’Hanraghty, not Murphy, who moved to one side of the stage with Drebin.
“We’re underway, so this information can be shared,” O’Hanraghty said. “We reserved this for ship’s captains as the news is…distressing. Approximately nineteen days ago, at 06:43 Inverness Zulu time, a League attack group numbering some seven vessels struck the planet’s capital. Over the next eighteen minutes, kinetic energy weapons destroyed key infrastructure targets across the inhabited northern hemisphere. Unlike previous League raids on our colonies, the population centers were largely untouched.”
Small expanding sets of rings peppered the holo planet.
“We believe this was done to elicit a humanitarian response,” the chief of staff continued, “which this group is providing. It’s possible that the atypical League attack profile was designed to elicit a humanitarian response in order to ambush it on arrival, but the probability of that is low, in our estimation.”
“Pardon, sir,” Gao stood up, “but how did you come to that estimation? Respectfully.”
“First, because they would have to anticipate that any response would come from Jalal and, therefore, would presumably come in force. But secondly, and more to the point, because Captain Drebin observed the League sublight units recover to their carrier and accelerate to supralight before he…effected his own withdrawal.”
Silence fell as Stanley and the other captains’ eyes swiveled to Drebin. If he’d seen the League exit the system, why hadn’t he gone back to help?
“We’ve used Captain Drebin’s knowledge of the planet to put together a preliminary plan to evacuate survivors,” O’Hanraghty said. “We’re not a merchant fleet with lots of extra parasite racks or a dedicated relief effort, but we have our Hoplon contingents and landing craft. Our goal is to evacuate those most at risk to New Dublin, then provide adequate shelter for those we cannot remove until such time as a proper relief force can arrive.”
“Oh boy,” Whitten muttered, rubbing his face as his mind moved ahead of the briefing. “This’ll be a mess.”
“I’ll turn the lectern over to Commander Mirwani to brief the relief effort.”
O’Hanraghty stepped away and Stanley turned his eyes back to Murphy while the ops officer moved to take his place. The admiral was smiling slightly. He seemed almost uninterested.
Something’s off, Stanley thought. This move is entirely too ballsy for some Heart World fop. What’s he really playing at?
Murphy’s smile returned no answer, and the commander removed a data slate from his pocket as Mirwani transmitted orders to the room.