Chain of Command Read online

  Sam did not find that particularly reassuring. Of course the attack was authorized. But if the task force had sailed with contingency plans this detailed, how peaceful had the original intention been? The uBakai had struck the first blow, taken the role of aggressor. But what if they hadn’t? Maybe they had been very obliging to strike that first blow. Maybe that’s just what the coalition had wanted when the task force was sent, but that left Sam more unsettled than the idea of a rogue admiral swept away by desire for revenge would have. If their side had wanted this to happen, then they had wanted Jules and the others to die. But that was a very big “if.”

  “Very well,” Kleindienst said, eyes narrowed with irritation. “The smart boss will update you on our current threat assessment.” She nodded to Commander Atwater-Jones.

  “Right,” she began. “Our best estimate, based on communication traffic analysis and sensor tracks over the last six months, is that the uBakai have four cruisers in the star system, of which two are currently in orbit around K’tok. One had been in orbit around Mogo but withdrew upon approach of Task Group 1.4—that’s Aradu and Exeter. We don’t know its angle of departure as it made its escape burn when Mogo was between it and our task force. Very clever boots, these uBakai. One cruiser is currently unaccounted for, but did depart K’tok orbit at a time consistent with Lieutenant Bitka’s theory of the initial uBakai attack profile.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” the dark-haired male officer with a squat face and bulbous nose said. He wore the three broad stripes of a commander and Sam finally placed him: Holloway Boynton, who had been Ops Boss on USS Theodore Roosevelt where Sam served as a sensor officer until three months earlier. He knew him by name but had never spoken to him.

  “No,” Atwater-Jones answered, “but if that cruiser made both attacks, and if it made its final evasive course correction using its MPD thrusters at a low enough energy level to escape thermal detection by us, we have a reasonably limited sphere in which it must be.”

  “Commander, we’ve had HRVS optics looking in your sphere for days, and haven’t found anything,” Boynton said.

  “Which means,” Atwater-Jones shot back, “either Leftenant Bitka’s theory is incorrect or the vessel is where we cannot detect it by visual stellar occlusion—which is to say it is directly between us and the asteroid belt, which I note we have not completed mapping.”

  “That’s enough,” Kleindienst snapped. “This is a briefing, not a staff debate.”

  “Quite right,” Atwater-Jones said. “As I was saying before I was interrupted, our best estimate is that they have four cruisers in the system, two around K’tok, one somewhere near Mogo, and one unaccounted for, but it’s bloody-well somewhere and up to mischief.

  “At present the surface objective is defended only by internal security forces, mostly military and civilian police. We rate their esprit and effectiveness as low. uBakai lift infantry and armor could be shifted back from the colonial frontier quite rapidly, but Operations is persuaded that our orbital bombardment assets can either prevent a large-scale move of mechanized forces or impose unacceptable losses on them. I must emphasize the importance of maintaining the orbital bombardment force on station in order to reduce the ground threat to manageable proportions.”

  She settled back in her chair and folded her hands over her lap.

  That was an interesting way of putting it—that the Ops staff was persuaded that the orbital bombardment would work, as if Atwater-Jones did not share that opinion but it wasn’t her job to question it.

  “Any more questions?” Captain Kleindienst asked and glowered at them. “Very well. Now for Destroyer Division Three’s specific part in this: Commander Boynton, the task force operations boss, will take over.”

  Task force ops boss? He must have moved up from Bully.

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.” Boynton put on a set of viewer glasses of his own and began speaking, probably reading from his prepared notes. “Because of the twenty-second burn the former captain of Puebla executed immediately after the first attack, USS Puebla is now seventy thousand kilometers in advance of the main body of DesDiv Three, and considerably farther in advance of the main body of the task force. Based on that, we’ve worked out the correction packages for Oaxaca, Tacambaro and Queretaro to use the thermal shroud of Puebla to occlude K’tok and mask their deceleration burns.

  “At those distances the tolerances are very tight, but doable if you follow the burn schedules precisely. Let me beam that data bundle over now and you can pass it to your Ops people. For what it’s worth, and considering the mission change for the division, I think Captain Huhn was right to want his Ops Boss in the conference. Not sure why we need the tac-heads.”

  “Noted,” Captain Kleindienst said dryly.

  Sam saw Huhn’s holographic image shift beside him.

  “Who will we use to mask our deceleration burn?” Huhn asked.

  “No one,” Kliendienst said. “Change in plans. You are detached to direct control of the task force commander for the duration of the assault phase. I think the admiral’s going to chop you to DesDiv Four but we’ll see how things shake out.”

  “You mean we’re going in with the assault force after all?” Huhn said, his voice wavering a bit. “I thought . . . I mean, we took a lot of damage, ma’am. And we’re very shorthanded, particularly officers.”

  Kleindienst said nothing but moved a pair of viewer glasses down from on top of her head onto her face and for a moment her eyes lost focus as she studied the data projected by them.

  “I’m looking at the list of repairs and you must have one hell of an A-gang, Captain Huhn. With the exception of being down one point defense laser, Puebla’s in better shape than any of the other three boats in the division. How are you dealing with only having seven PDLs?”

  After a moment of silence Huhn turned and looked at Sam, as did Filipenko on his other side.

  “Software patch on ATITEP is all we can manage for now, ma’am,” Sam said. “Engineering says we can still get full coverage. We just won’t have as much redundancy.”

  “Less defensive firepower in a stern-on engagement,” Kleindienst said.

  “A destroyer’s preferred angle of engagement is bow-on, ma’am.”

  Boynton, the task force operations chief, shifted in his chair and scowled. “Is that your professional judgment, Lieutenant? Sounds like hot air to me.”

  Kleindiesnt’s eyes narrowed slightly and she turned to her left. “Commander Boynton, he’s quoting our basic manual on deep space tactical principles: DSTP-01, chapter four, something like section seven or eight. Which is it, Bitka?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, I don’t remember. It was just something that stuck in my mind.”

  “Well, I suppose there are worse things to stick in there. Anything else?”

  Sam thought for a moment, unsure whether he should press his luck, but there was a problem they needed to address while they still could.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am concerned about our ability to deal with another round of damage. We took a hit in an engineering parts bay, so a lot of our key replacement parts are gone, over and above the actual damaged components we had to replace. If you want us up front and active, we could really use a component resupply.”

  “It’s not possible, Lieutenant,” Commander Boynton said, taking off his view glasses and tossing them on his workstation in anger. “If you had an astrogation background you’d understand that. You know Hornet’s crippled. You want one of the destroyers in your division to shuttle back and forth to Hornet for parts? It’s not feasible, either from the point of view of reaction mass or available time.”

  Sam fought a momentary urge to answer that arrogant prick the way he deserved, but swallowed it and nodded seriously instead.

  “You’re absolutely right, sir, which is why that’s not what I had in mind. I bet most of the parts we need are on the other three division boats, and as they’re heading back to Hornet anyway—”

  “W-wait!” C
aptain Bonaventure of Oaxaca said, as if suddenly waking from a nap. “What’s that?”

  “Make up your list, Bitka,” Kleindienst said, “but light a fire under it. Captain Bonaventure, you fill that list, but spread it out. No more than two cargo pods per boat. I want your three division boats headed back to Hornet ASAP. The admiral detached an Indian cruiser—INS Kolkata—as close escort back there but he wants it up front in his line of battle when the shooting starts. Our two cruisers at Mogo won’t get to us until at least two weeks after we reach K’tok orbit. Until INS Kolkata can rejoin, the cruiser force is down to four heavies.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not happy about cannibalizing my parts lockers,” Bonaventure said. “As beat up as Hornet is, what guarantee is there she’ll be able to restock us when we get there?”

  “None,” Kleindienst said. “Make it happen anyway.”

  Then she turned to her right and glared at Atwater-Jones. “And what are you grinning about?”

  Atwater-Jones smiled sweetly at the chief of staff. “Nothing in particular, mum. I hail from a green and pleasant land and it makes me cheerful by disposition. Sometimes just thinking about Old Blighty makes me smile.”

  Kleindienst turned back with a sour look. “Now, if there are no more questions, we’ve all got work to do. Let’s get on it.”

  She cut the connection and all of the holo-images vanished, leaving Sam alone in his office. He waited for his commlink to vibrate, waited for the accompanying ID tone of the captain, but it did not come and Del Huhn faded a little more. After five minutes he gave up, squinted up the boat’s directory, and pinged Rose Hennessey, the chief engineer.

  “Hennessey, I got six two-cubic-meter cargo pods worth of replacement parts lined up from the other three division boats, but I need a prioritized list of what you want and I need it fast.”

  “Six pods? Bitka . . . I want to have your babies!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  19 December 2133

  (twelve day later) (two days from K’tok orbit)

  “They’re gone,” Delacroix said, her eyes on the sensor repeaters.

  “Looks that way to me,” Robinette agreed.

  Petty Officer Second Elise Delacroix sat Tac Three and Ensign Jerry Robinette sat Tac One on the bridge, with Sam in the command chair. They’d been at Readiness Condition Two—half of the crew on watch—for the last day. An hour ago Sam had taken over for Ensign Barb Lee as OOD to give her a breather.

  They were coming up on K’tok. The transports and fleet auxiliaries had already begun their deceleration burns preparatory for entering orbit. The warships had more powerful drives and so could put off the burn longer, then make it short and hard. They’d go to general quarters then, but not until they had to. They could only keep everyone at their battle stations so long before performance went into the toilet.

  Sam looked at his own sensor repeaters, showing the radar return echoes from the sensor probe far out ahead of the task force, far enough to have cleared K’Tok’s orbital track and look “behind” it, into the space the planet occluded. Nothing there.

  “Those two uBakai cruisers only disappeared two days ago,” Sam said, as much to himself as the others. “Where did they go?”

  “Hiding with the asteroids behind them, like the Red Duchess said about the other one?” Robinette said. “And how come we don’t have a decent data map of the asteroid belt in this star system? All our stellar occlusion detection routines freak out as soon as we dump any data in with the asteroids in the frame. A million bogies, maybe more.”

  The “Red Duchess” had become Commander Atwater-Jones’s nickname throughout the boat, and apparently throughout the task force. Red came from the color of her hair. They called her a duchess partly because she was English, but also because she had an Oxford accent and money, judging by the fact her Royal Navy shipsuit was not standard issue but tailored, apparently by some famous “Old Bespoke” designer on Saville Row, if you believed all the scuttlebutt, which also required you to believe she had had sex with most of the male and half the female admirals in the Royal Navy, and possibly several members of the royal family. Sam’s state of mind, particularly concerning Jules’s death, had been such that he had not taken much notice of the British officer’s looks in their first encounter, but everyone else had.

  This all confirmed Sam in his belief that mariners on long deployment were like old men and women with nothing to do but make up gossip. Atwater-Jones was certainly attractive, but he wouldn’t call her vid-star beautiful. She did have an interesting attitude. He wondered if Jules would have liked her. Atwater-Jones was almost old enough to have been Jules’s mother—was old enough if she’d been naughty very early, and of course the gossips suggested exactly that. He saw a familiar flicker in the corner of his eye, turned to ask Jules, but of course she wasn’t there.

  Focus: cruisers and asteroids . . .

  “I think Survey is working on a data set of the asteroids,” he said, “but that’s not the problem here, Ensign. We’re coming down on K’tok from straight above the plane, galactic north, so they can’t be hiding in the background clutter. Only direction for those two cruisers to run and keep K’tok between us and them is straight down, below the plane, and there’s no asteroids down there to hide in—nothing but stars and hard vacuum. Your stellar occusion routines are working fine.”

  So where the hell had they gone?

  Sam closed his eyes and concentrated on the problem. To keep K’tok between them and the task force left a very narrow cone where they could be. The uBakai could have gone cold, turned their thermal shrouds toward K’tok, and coasted away once they’d made their burn, but the probe was pumping active radar energy down that cone and getting no bounce-back. A thermal shroud didn’t stop radar echoes and there were no known means of defeating the multi-wavelength variable-pulse radar mounted on the US Navy sensor probes. Even if the uBakai had some new stealth trick up their sleeves, these cruisers were both from a familiar class of uBakai warships that ground-based radar had tracked with no trouble earlier. They couldn’t just have turned invisible.

  “Maybe they jumped out-system,” Robinette said. “I mean, we outnumber them—what—five to one in combatants? I’d sure get the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Smartest thing you’ve said so far, Ensign. I’m just reluctant to assume all our problems are over and they jumped back to Akaampta or someplace else. Would they give up the system that easily? Why start a war and then run away?”

  His commlink vibrated and when he squinted he saw the ID tag for the engineering officer, Rose Hennessey.

  “Yeah, Hennesey, what’s up?”

  “Mr. Bitka, we have a situation in the wardroom and we need you here, right away.”

  “I’m standing watch for Ensign Lee.”

  “She’s here, and I’ll send her forward, but you need to get here as soon as you can.”

  She sounded frightened, or maybe just out of her depth, off-balance. Sam couldn’t remember ever hearing her sound quite like that.

  “On my way,” he said and cut the connection. He turned to Ensign Robinette, who had still never stood a watch as Officer of the Deck.

  “Big day for you, Ensign. The boat is at Readiness Condition Two, Material Condition Bravo, on task force course for K’tok. Power ring is fully charged, reactor on standby, shroud deployed, sensors passive. Expect your relief by Ensign Lee shortly, but until then it’s your boat.”

  “I . . . I relieve you, sir,” Robinette said, his eyes larger than a moment before.

  I’m turning the boat over to The Jughead, Sam thought to himself as he unbuckled his harness. What could possibly go wrong?

  Sam passed Lieutenant Barb Lee going in opposite directions in the central trunk, her normally pinched features looking even more distressed.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “If I say, you’ll probably arrest me for conduct unbecoming,” she answered as she glided by, avoiding eye contact.

  Maybe he
had overdone it in telling Filipenko to come down hard on her. Lee hadn’t spoken to him much since then, come to think of it. He should have noticed, but everyone had been busy getting ready to enter K’tok orbit and almost certainly fight a major ship-to-ship action. Well, angry with him or not, it sounded like the problem was with Huhn.

  A minute later Sam pulled himself through the door of the wardroom and saw a tableau which would not have been all that unusual were it not for the awkward and distressed expressions on the participants’ faces—that and the fact Captain Huhn was in his dress whites complete with all decorations. Dress whites weren’t really made for zero gee and Sam noticed the trouser cuffs floating up high enough to show a band of pale hairy leg above the socks. Huhn floated at the head of the wardroom table with Goldjune to his right and Rose Hennessey and Moe Rice, to his left. Chief Navarro and Tamblinson the med tech floated near the end of the table as well. Actually, the presence of two enlisted crew in the wardroom was unusual.

  Everyone’s eyes turned to him as he entered. Huhn’s visage was unreadable, but from the expressions on everyone else’s faces Sam had the feeling he was in trouble—a lot of trouble. Maybe those mass-approved damage survey reports were coming back to haunt him. Or maybe one of the two enlisted crew were the ones in trouble. Somebody sure was.

  “Sam, come over here,” Huhn said. Sam kicked lightly off the door and floated over to the table. Goldjune moved down the table, making room for Sam next to the captain. Sam clipped his tether lanyard to the table and held a bracket, mostly to keep his hand from trembling.

  Huhn fingered his decorations, particularly an odd one, a large silver, gold, and red multi-pointed star or flower—Sam wasn’t sure which—that looked foreign and out of place below the orderly ranks of colored rectangular ribbons that represented his US Navy awards. Huhn’s index finger traced the edge of the star, lingered on one of the points.