Chain of Command Read online

  “Sharp. Could hurt someone with this if you weren’t careful,” Huhn said. “Order of the State of the Republic of Turkey. Got it back in ‘29. I saved the daughter of the Turkish ambassador to Bronstein’s World. Just a teenager, got caught in an airlock without a vacuum suit, but I kicked a circuit box open and shorted it out, so we could pop the hatch manually. Just used my head is all, but everybody else panicked. Saved that girl’s life and got this for it. Proudest day of my life.”

  Sam wondered if he meant the day he saved the girl’s life or the day he received the medal.

  “It’s very impressive, sir. What was it you wanted?”

  “Sam, some of us are cut out for certain things, but not others. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Sometimes we have to face hard truths about ourselves, look in the mirror and see things we don’t want to see, would rather look away from. But we’ve got to look, Sam. We’ve got to look hard.”

  Huhn stared at him as if he expected a reply but Sam said nothing.

  “We’re about to go into battle, Sam, and we all need to ask ourselves, ‘Am I cut out for this?’ It’s hard, but a lot of lives depend on us answering that question as truthfully as we know how. Do you agree with that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sam answered and licked his dry lips.

  He had wondered this, many times, and also wondered if seeing ghosts might be a disqualification for duty. But he had no idea how to answer those questions except to see it through, do his duty as well as he could, and on the other side of it find out if that was good enough. He’d done okay in the first battle, but it had caught him by surprise. This coming fight filled him with a growing dread. He’d looked forward to their arrival, going to general quarters, facing whatever stood before them, but not because he longed for danger. It was only because he wanted this awful uncertainty, this dark foreboding, to end.

  “Well, I’ve been looking in my mirror,” Huhn said. “I’ve spent a lot of the last week looking in it, and I know now: I’m not cut out to command this boat in battle. I’m cut out for a lot of things in the Navy, but not that. I think. . . I think I need a rest is all. That’s why I asked Medtech Tamblinson here, to certify me medically unfit for command.”

  Sam looked at Tamblinson, whose eyes were larger than Robinette’s had been earlier when Sam turned the watch over to him for the first time. He looked at Goldjune and faced cold hostility, at Hennessey and faced anxiety bordering on panic, and he realized the trouble he was in was real, but was entirely different than he had originally thought, had in fact never imagined, and he felt this heart rate climb and chest constrict with the beginning of panic.

  “Captain, I. . . I wouldn’t do anything too hasty. You need to be—”

  “What? Certain? You think I’m doing this on the spur of the moment? Haven’t thought it through?”

  Sam licked his suddenly dry lips again, and swallowed to loosen his tight throat. “Nothing like that, sir. It’s just. . . if you do this, it’s going to change your life, and there’s no changing it back.”

  That was dishonest. Sam didn’t give a damn about Huhn’s future. He simply wanted no part of being captain. This was a job on which the lives of nearly a hundred people depended, and a job which he was so totally unprepared for he could not imagine any outcome but disastrous failure.

  Huhn looked down at the table for a moment and then looked back up into Sam’s eyes.

  “At least my conscience will be clear.”

  Sam wanted to scream at him, wanted to slap sense into him, wanted to get up and leave the wardroom, come back in and try again from the beginning. Instead he floated by the table and stared dumbly at Captain Huhn. . . no, not captain anymore. . . at Lieutenant Commander Huhn.

  Sam noticed that, while the grim-faced image of Captain Marietta Kleindienst, the task force chief of staff, remained fixed in his view, the ghosted image of the work area behind her floated gently, so she was holoconferencing by helmet from the flag bridge of Pensacola, not from the conference room up in the rotating habitat wheel where there was spin-induced gravity and a full holosuite. Sam couldn’t see her helmet, any more than she could see his, one of the odd effects of the helmet optics. The internal optics looked in and recorded the speaker’s face and head while the external optics looked out and recorded the nearby environment, but neither of them recorded the helmet itself.

  “Mister Bitka, exactly what in the Sam Hell is going on over there?” Kleindienst demanded. “Lieutenant Colonel Okonkwo just got off the link and sounded like he was going to have a stroke.”

  No one on Puebla had been sure who to notify about Huhn’s action, but Moe Rice had recommended the task force personnel department. Okonkwa was the task force N1—personnel chief—and Sam’s own conversation with him a quarter of an hour earlier had been difficult, eventually becoming heated.

  “Yes, ma’am. When I spoke with him the situation seemed . . . beyond his personal experience. I don’t know that any ship captain in the Nigerian Navy has ever requested relief from command and duty on medical grounds—at least for this reason. But that’s the situation with Lieutenant Commander Huhn.”

  It sounded strange not to call Huhn “captain.”

  Sam didn’t know much about the Nigerian Navy, but Okonkwo ‘s rank was lieutenant colonel, not commander. The fact they used the same rank titles as the army instead of most other nations’ navies was a small thing, but it still seemed like a strike against them.

  “And do I understand that those medical grounds are ‘pyschological exhaustion?’” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you actually went along with this?”

  “He didn’t give us a lot of options. As long as he was in command, we had no choice but to obey his orders, and his last order was, ‘Take command.’ “

  “It sounds pretty fishy to me. I just spoke to him on commlink but he won’t holoconference so I can’t tell if someone’s holding a gauss pistol to his head. If you’re pulling some kind of fast one over there, you will spend the rest of your natural life in a Navy brig. Do you read me?”

  “Ma’am, you can commlink anybody you want to on this boat. If you think there’s some kind of conspiracy and everyone’s in on it . . . well, then I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t have a holoconference suite over here, just our helmet optics. Lieutenant Commander Huhn won’t holoconference because he’s in his dress whites and won’t change out of them for a shipsuit, so he’s got no helmet mount.”

  “No shipsuit? Is he crazy?”

  Sam didn’t answer. Kleindienst studied him for a moment.

  “Has he been acting . . . odd?”

  Sam paused to think about his answer, to choose his words carefully.

  “Nothing he did was outside the behavioral latitude enjoyed by a commanding officer on his own vessel, ma’am.”

  Kleindienst’s scowl deepened. “Meaning all captains get to act a little nuts? Alright, maybe you got a point. If you’d come running to the squadron medical officer with a list of peculiar behaviors, I’d have slapped you down as a disloyal bellyacher. And I’d have been right.”

  Sam said nothing.

  “Atwater-Jones thinks you’re smart, Bitka. Maybe so. But I never thought ‘smart’ was the most important attribute of a successful ship captain. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m smart enough to know I’m in over my head.”

  She nodded.

  “I agree. You’re short line officers, too, aren’t you? I’ve got someone in mind to send over to take command: Lieutenant Commander Barger, in the operations shop of the task force staff. Good man: Annapolis, class of ‘17. The shuttle can take Huhn off at the same time, bring him over here and we’ll see if he can handle some light staff duty. But Barger’s coordinating the orbital bombardment plan and I’d rather not bring someone else up to speed between now and the landing. Can you keep things together over there for, oh, let’s say five days?”

&
nbsp; “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kleindienst cut the link without saying anything more.

  The uBakai Star Navy had left K’tok orbit, so the task force shouldn’t encounter any resistance when they made their strike, and Puebla would be with the auxiliaries anyway. Five days—the duration of the short and hopefully uneventful career of Captain Sam Bitka, USNR. Chief Navarro should be able to keep him from screwing up too badly for that long. Then he would help Barger however he could, get through this war, and get back to his job on Earth.

  He remembered joking with Jules that this was like Space Camp with better food, but that was before people started dying.

  He triggered his commlink, squinted up the link for Ensign Lee—officer of the deck—pinged her, and had her patch him through the boat-wide announcement channel.

  “All hands, this is Lieutenant Bitka speaking. At 1421 hours today Captain Huhn relieved himself of duty on medical grounds and turned over command of USS Puebla to me. I’ve just spoken to the task force chief of staff and we can expect a replacement captain once the initial operations in K’tok orbit are completed. Until then I will serve as acting captain.

  “Lieutenant Commander Huhn will remain onboard until my relief arrives. He will be treated with the utmost respect and rendered every military courtesy by the crew at all times.

  “Carry on.”

  Sam cut the channel and went back to clearing the last of the paperwork on the replacement parts received from the other boats in the division, the repairs undertaken onboard, and the work that a proper shipyard needed to address the next time they saw one. He had already decided to continue with the XO job as well as command until his relief showed up. He saw no need to further disrupt the schedules and responsibilities of his fellow officers, short-handed as they already were. Everyone had to carry more water, and that included him.

  He finished the report and moved on to an intel bulletin from the task force. Sensors had picked up a strong energy glow consistent with starships running their fusion plants to recharge their power ring, probably after emerging from jump space. The contact was over eighty million kilometers galactic south of the planetary plane and whoever it was they weren’t making a secret of their presence. If they were coming to K’Tok from there, the task force would have plenty of time to get ready. He made sure the Tac department was on the distribution list.

  A half-hour later his commlink vibrated and then he heard a feminine voice in his head.

  Sir, this is Signaler Second Lincoln, duty comm. I have another incoming tight beam for you from USS Pensacola, a Lieutenant Commander Barger.

  “Right, patch him through.” Sam heard the click of the circuit changing. “Bitka here.”

  Lieutenant Bitka, this is Lieutenant Commander Lemuel Barger. Captain Kleindienst has just told me what’s going on and that I am to take command and straighten things up over there as soon as the landing force is down and has secured the objective.

  “Yes, sir, I—”

  Do not interrupt me, Bitka.

  “No, sir.”

  I know Delmar Huhn. I cannot say we are close friends, but I believe he was capable of handling command of a vessel in combat, especially as part of a larger task force, provided he received the support of his subordinates. Given his emotional collapse, I can only assume he did not receive that needed support. I am made of sterner stuff than Delmar Huhn, Mister Bitka. I will not tolerate disloyalty among my officers, and I will get to the bottom of what went on over there once I take command. Is that understood?

  “Yes, sir.”

  A reckoning is coming, Mister Bitka. I hope you will share this information with your fellow-officers and the senior chiefs.

  “Understood, sir.”

  The connection broke and Sam sat there for a while, staring at the open report on remaining food consumables without really seeing it.

  Well, Barger hadn’t actually ordered him to poison the morale of his officers and chiefs, he had just “hoped” he would do so. Barger outranked Sam, but he had no authority to dictate what Sam did as captain of his own boat. And Sam had not promised to do so; he had only said he understood what Barger hoped for.

  So at least for the next five days the officers and crew would go about their duties as if their loyalty were not under suspicion. They would go into battle with pride, believing they were appreciated and that their sacrifices so far, and their efforts to overcome battle damage and crew casualties, were valued by their superiors. Sam could at least see to that.

  And for those next five days, until Lieutenant Commander Lemuel Barger was actually captain of USS Puebla, he could hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one filled up quicker.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  19-20 December 2133

  (later that day and the next) (one day from K’tok orbit)

  Before turning in, Sam had a visit from Lieutenant Marina Filipenko, an official visit that he had requested. She accepted a hot green tea and the two of them floated in his stateroom tethered to stanchions and at first just looked at the star field displayed on the smart wall.

  “Filipenko, I’m kind of skipper and XO rolled into one for now. I’m supposed to make sure the crew functions as a team, you know? Something’s eating at you. It’s hard enough dealing with a war none of us expected, but something else is going on with you. I don’t want to intrude in your private life, but you’ve become an essential officer, a keystone member of the crew. If there’s anything I can do to help, let me.”

  She floated silently for what seemed like a long time, looking down at the deck, thinking. Finally she shook her head.

  “I don’t know that there is anything you can do. I think I made a terrible mistake leaving home. You don’t . . . I don’t know that any of you can understand the sort of bond there is between folks on the BW—that’s what we call Bronstein’s World most of the time, the BW. It’s like a club, but everyone has to pay dues to stay a member, and the dues are really high, and you have to pay them every single day. But everyone there does—or they die and that’s that.”

  She was silent for a while and finally Sam said, “Gotta be tough. But you got away. Took control of your life again.”

  She shook her head.

  “I ran away. I ran, and I abandoned my family, my friends, everyone on the BW. I said, ‘I’m not like you. I can’t do this.’ But I didn’t understand how important it was to be like them, to belong to that tribe, until I quit. That’s what it is, a tribe. None like it anywhere.

  “I thought I’d find it here in the Navy, a new tribe, but . . . ” she looked around and then shook her head.

  “Strikes me as pretty tribal,” Sam said. He’d never thought of it in quite those terms, but it fit.But once he said it, the thought made him uneasy.

  “Yes, but a very silly tribe,” she shot back and glanced up at him, gave him that long, penetrating stare, and then shrugged. “Not supposed to say things like that, I know. But at Annapolis, everyone was so proud of what they had endured to get through each year, so proud of what they had accomplished by the end. All I could think was, twelve-year-olds on the BW have gone through more, endured more, had to shoulder more personal responsibility for their survival, than anyone at that graduation, and nobody ever told they to throw their hats in the air and crow about how exceptional they were. Now all my classmates do is preen and bicker and jostle for the right place at the wardroom table.

  “God, I hate it! I hate the Navy.”

  The passion and bitterness in her voice took him back, and Sam took a while thinking about it before answering.

  “It’s funny, before this whole war thing started Del Huhn and I got into it over disciplining two of my petty officers and I told him it was stuff like that made people hate the Navy. To tell you the truth, I think I was talking about myself as much as anyone. But that was before the war. War has a way of . . . broadening your thinking, you know?”

  She shrugged, not meeting his eyes.

  “I guess ther
e are different versions of the US Navy, different layers. I don’t hate them all, and I don’t think you do either. There’s one I think of as The Entitled Navy. That’s the one where politically well-connected officers take for granted that their superiors will treat them with circumspection and wink at their shortcomings, and it turns out they’re right—that one I hate.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she nodded.

  “There’s another one where everyone’s got an eye on what comes next, whether it’s the next assignment or the job after you’re done with the Navy, and puts smoothing the way for that above doing their job here and now. The Nest Feathering Navy. Not crazy about that one either.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Tell you what I am crazy about, though. I’m crazy about my tactical department—yours too now. Joe Burns stepped up to Bull Tac like he was born for the job.”

  “Yes! God, I don’t know how I’d have managed the department without him.”

  “Joyce Menzies is like some sort of missile savant, and we might even make something of Ensign Robinette, too.”

  “He’s trying hard,” she admitted.

  “Got a pretty good engineering department, world-class A-gang. I’m even getting used to Ops. Goldjune and I are never going to bosom buddies, but so what?” Sam paused and looked around his cabin. “I’ll tell you what I’m crazy about: this boat. I don’t mind telling you it comes as something of a surprise.”

  “It’s a fine boat,” she agreed.

  “This is our tribe, Marina. Maybe tribes are like cats: you don’t find them, they find you.”

  For the first time Sam could recall, Filipenko chuckled.

  After two hours of floating and sweating in his sleep cubby, Sam awoke from a nightmare of Puebla dying under a hail of uBakai laser fire because he had forgotten how to maneuver the boat, forgotten how to order the weapons division to fire, been unable to form the right words, and so they had drifted impotently into the uBakai killing zone.