Chain of Command Read online

  “The two surviving cruisers are off-loading their bombardment munitions dispensers in low orbit. You will have to improvise a means of aiming and firing them, but the task force operations department is working on a communications network upgrade for you now. We’re also leaving a two-seater orbital tug with each group of dispensers to aid in repositioning them.”

  Kleindienst’s answers sounded rehearsed, which made sense. She’d clearly thought through the obvious questions they would ask. For a moment Bonaventure stared at her, mouth open. Sam exchanged a look with Captain Mike Wu of Petersburg, who shrugged.

  “Excuse me, Ma’am,” Wu said, “but if the cruisers are off-loading ordnance in orbit, we could use some of their Mark Three missiles as well. We can reposition them in a higher orbit and once they’re powered down they’d be all but undetectable.”

  “Yes, good idea,” Bonaventure said, nodding vigorously. “When the uBakai show up, we can give them a nice surprise.”

  “You’ll have to use some of your own missiles for that,” Kleindienst answered.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am,” Wu said, “but our Mark Fives are designed for launch by coil guns. They don’t really have any thrust of their own, except for some ability to take evasive action. But those Mark Threes are self-flying, with their own thrusters. We can—”

  “The cruisers need all their missiles,” Kleindienst said, cutting him off. “Any other questions?”

  Bonaventure shook his head, more in exasperation than negation, Sam thought. The silence stretched out for several seconds.

  “What about logistics?” Sam finally asked. “Not ours, but the troops down in the dirt.”

  “The composite brigade’s rear support company has secured the needle highstation,” she answered. “The fleet auxiliaries have off-loaded the supplies the troops on the ground need, in proximate orbit with the highstation. The support company will see to moving it down the needle, but if they need some help, pitch in.”

  “Yes, but what about the lost fabricators for the British cohort?” Sam said. “Did they ever get the codes to let the other units fabricate for them?”

  Kleindienst’s eyebrows went up for a moment, perhaps surprised that Sam knew this detail of the supply arrangements.

  “The British are stretching their own supplies by using captured small arms and ammunition,” she said.

  That would be a no.

  “Speaking of logistics,” Bonaventure said, “we could sure use Hornet here in orbit to support us. It has the best facilities for retrofitting the warhead patch on the Mark Five Block Four missiles, so we could get up and running quicker. I think Commander Rivera’s division could probably use a missile resupply as well, and Hornet’s magazines are full.”

  “Hornet’s too vulnerable to leave here in orbit,” Kleindienst said, “and we’ll need its workshops to support the task force at Mogo. Transfer whatever material you need from Hornet today, before you start your deceleration burn. Clear it through the task force N-4 first.”

  “That’s only about six hours, Ma’am,” Bonaventure said.

  “Noted.”

  Sam looked at the others and saw grim expressions. Everything he’d heard so far sounded as if they were being written off.

  “Ma’am, our crews are coming up on six weeks in zero gee,” Sam said. “Any chance of rotating them to the cruisers and transports for at least a day in a spin habitat wheel?”

  “No, there isn’t time. We expect to have a relief force to you well before you experience serious zero gee health issues.”

  Or else we’ll be dead by then, Sam thought.

  No one said anything for several seconds, then Juanita Rivera spoke, the first time she had spoken in the meeting.

  “Yeah, let me get this right.”

  Sam looked at her. She looked about as angry as she had by the end of the Atwater-Jones briefing.

  “The task force is taking three combatants—two cruisers and a destroyer—and leaving six combatants—our destroyers—here to carry out the primary mission, with four more destroyers on the way.”

  “That is correct, Captain Rivera. Did you have a question?”

  “Si, Seňora. Which of our destroyers is Admiral Kayumati moving his flag to?”

  Sam suppressed a smile. She had a bigger set than he did, or just the confidence which came from being a long-service regular who had spent years preparing to be a boat captain. Wherever it came from, sometimes it took real guts to point out the obvious: that the commanding admiral’s place just might be at the point of greatest danger and strategic importance.

  Kleindienst straightened, her eyes narrowed, and color came to her fleshy cheeks. “There will be five combatants at Mogo once we rendezvous there, including our heaviest elements. That will be the task force center of gravity, and that is where the admiral needs to be.”

  “Five?” Sam said. “I thought the two cruisers at Mogo were inbound and due here in six days.”

  “Their jump drives make them too vulnerable. They will do a fly-by and slingshot maneuver to follow the main body to Mogo.”

  So they really were on their own. The chief of staff glared at each of the ship captains in succession, as if daring them to ask another question. After several seconds of silence, she cut the connection.

  Kleindienst disappeared, along with the virtual briefing room background, but the four captains, surrounded by ghostly details of their cabins, continued to float in what was now a featureless, dimensionless gray void. Looking into it gave Sam a sensation of vertigo and so he looked at Bonaventure, concentrated on his face.

  “I kept the connection open because I wanted to add something,” Bonaventure said. “This sounds like a raw deal. I don’t like it any more than anyone else. But you got a big mouth, Juanita, and you came real close to open insubordination with the chief of staff. You need to put a lid on that defeatist bullshit, understood? All of us need to work together to get through this.”

  “Bullshit? Jesús, listen to you, Pablo! A commodore for five minutes and already you talk like el almirante grande. You want me to shut up? Sure-sure, no hay pedo, I shut up. But you know where the bullshit was coming from in that briefing, and it wasn’t from Juanita Rivera.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  31 December 2133

  (two days later) (tenth day in K’tok orbit)

  The general quarters gong still sounded and Goldjune had already moved to the Maneuvering One chair when Sam arrived on the bridge. As he strapped into the command chair he studied the tactical schematic on the smart wall ahead of him—already obscured by the interference of a nuclear explosion in orbit, but almost on the far side of K’tok from Puebla.

  “What the hell happened? Is it an attack?”

  “Yes, sir,” Goldjune said. “Captain, the boat’s at general quarters, MatCon alpha, task group standing orbit and speed, reactor on standby, full charge on the ring, shroud secured, sensors active. No change in orbit since last watch change. At 0721, we had two sudden new contacts—looks like another jump emergence—and I sounded general quarters”.

  “Very well, Mr. Goldjune, I have the boat. Where are they? Behind K’tok?”

  “Yes sir. Another polar approach, only two cruisers this time. By the time I had the boat aligned, they had passed our firing window.”

  Sam brought up his own tactical display and walked it back to the contact point. Only two uBakai cruisers?

  “Helm, give me a lateral acceleration warning and then align the boat on his transit point, where they’ll break the disk.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  The claxon sounded as Marina Filipenko came through the hatch. She waited for the initial burn to start and then climbed up and into the Tac One chair.

  “How many of them?” she asked.

  “Two. They’re over there on the far side of K’tok”

  Filipenko brought up her own display. “Um . . . Captain Rivera’s boat, Champion Hill, is in low orbit, tending the bombardment munitions.�
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  Sam pulled up the tactical recording, ran it forward at high speed and then backwards and couldn’t make any sense of what was going on. The one thing he was sure of was that the bandits had fired the missiles that had detonated and cluttered up their sensors. He glanced down to check who was in the Tac Two seat.

  “Chief Patel, you take the long-range sensors, up and active. This can’t be the whole story. There may be more leatherheads on the way. There have to be. Don’t let them sneak up on us.”

  Two cruisers, popping out of jump space at ridiculously close range, doing a fast fly-by. . . what was this supposed to accomplish?

  “There he is, breaking the disc!” Filipenko called out.

  Sam saw it on his own display, the uBakai cruisers emerging from the sensor shadow of K’tok, emerging from behind the disc of the planet. The data tag showed their range increasing at over twenty kilometers per second.

  “No firing solution, sir. They’re going too fast and on a receding vector.”

  Sam nodded but still couldn’t figure out what had just happened.

  “Captain, I’m picking up an SOS from Champion Hill,” Chief Gambara in the Comm Chair said. “It’s an automated transmitter, not audio. They may be fucked up pretty bad, sir.”

  “Helm, who’s in the best position to render assistance?” Sam asked.

  “Cha-cha,” Goldjune answered, and then he turned to look at Sam. He didn’t look smug, he didn’t wear that half-sneer of contempt he used to specialize in. No, Larry Goldjune looked scared and confused, and hoping Sam had the answers he didn’t.

  Sam.

  Wasn’t that interesting?

  It took all of the morning and part of the afternoon to sort through the data records and figure out what happened. At 1130 hours it became Sam’s job.

  Bitka, Commodore Bonaventure had said via tight beam commlink, I see in your service folder that when you were at Pearl River you took the course on squadron-level intelligence analysis, and ended second in the class. Say something smart about how to look at all of the data we are collecting

  Sam thought for a moment and said the first thing he’d learned in the course that struck him as genuinely interesting. “Don’t waste your time trying to guess what the enemy’s going to do. Concentrate on what he’s capable of doing.”

  Huh. Bueno, you’re hired. You are now the task group’s acting N-2. Find out what just happened.

  And so he had. The hardest part had been trying to reconstruct what happened to Champion Hill. He didn’t have any crew interviews to work from yet since Cha-Cha was still recovering the survivors and they were undergoing medical triage. He did eventually have a copy of the data record from Champion Hill’s engineering department, which also included the command log up until the last moment. He also had an external video survey of the boat which made him dizzy the first time he looked at it.

  The forward third of the boat was nothing but twisted, spidery wreckage. The bow itself, all the way back to about the bridge, was completely gone. A fire lance hit wouldn’t do this much damage. It wouldn’t do this sort of damage. This looked as if something had torn the nose off and shredded everything behind it, just peeled it back in places like a banana skin. Another new uBakai secret weapon?

  The answer was hidden in the command data logs. Once he made sure he understood what the uBakai cruisers had been doing in their high-speed fly-by, he contacted Bonaventure.

  “Commodore, that was a transport mission. The cruisers dropped sixteen large-capacity reentry gliders. It wasn’t easy to see them through the noise of that nuke they set off, which was probably the intention, but we’ve got a good composite picture from a couple different platforms. I’ve narrowed the likely landing area. It’s six hundred kilometers northwest of T’tokl-Heem, the colonial capital.”

  What for, do you think? Bonaventure asked.

  “All I can tell you is what those gliders are capable of carrying: about fifty tons of cargo each or one hundred and fifty passengers, or some mix of that, depending on their configuration. The most likely cargo, given the situation, is military, but that could be better-trained ground troops or heavy equipment—either armored vehicles or surface-to-orbit weaponry. I’d recommend keeping an eye on the landing site.”

  Huh. In and out fast to drop off high-priority cargo. Stretched as thin as we are, it makes sense. And what about Champion Hill?

  San shook his head. “I was worried about some new super-weapon, but Captain Rivera just had some really bad luck—no other way to put it. The recovered logs show she was firing a missile exactly when the uBakai hit her with a fire lance forward. The fire lance strike must have compromised the coil gun shaft, but the missile was still coming. It hit the shaft blockage already going between five and six kilometers a second. Fortunately, the warhead didn’t fire or no one would have survived, but it still packed a hell of a lot of kinetic energy.”

  Yes, enough to blow the nose off and shred everything forward of about frame forty, Bonaventure said. Some of the wreckage is hot—radioactive hot. That would be the material from the warhead’s fission trigger, yes?

  “Yes, sir. How many survivors?”

  Fifty-two, but three of them might not make it and we’re going to have to freeze a lot of the other injured. Juanita Rivera was on the bridge. I doubt we’ll ever find her body, or any of her bridge crew. It took out the forward crew bay as well. We’ll shift as many survivors as we can to the Highstation. We don’t have the medical facilities to deal with them. The admiral should have left Hornet behind. Even just parked in high orbit, it would have been doing something—repair work, a hospital suite, letting our people rotate through for some plus-gee time. Something.

  Sam knew his boss was right, but being right didn’t get them much.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  31 December 2133

  (later the same day) (tenth day in K’tok orbit)

  Sam had finished his dinner and evening administrative work when he heard the chime at his cabin door. He turned the hatch transparent and was surprised to see Lieutenant Commander Delmar Huhn in the corridor.

  “Sam, do you have moment?” Huhn said to the door, still an opaque gray on his side.

  Sam’s first impulse was to say no, to plead pressing business, but his own orders to the crew had been to extend Huhn the courtesy and respect appropriate to his rank.

  Fifth Principle of Naval Leadership: Set The Example

  He released the hatch lock.

  “Of course. Come in, Commander Huhn.”

  Sam noticed he carried an oblong brown plastic or composite box under his arm, no more than twenty centimeters square and twice that in length.

  Hope it’s not a bomb, the paranoid guy that lived in the dark back of his head thought.

  Sam gestured to the two zero-gee “chairs”—actually padded torso frames—along one wall. Both men kicked gently off and glided over to them, Huhn from the hatchway and Sam from his workstation. Once they were tethered in, the silence stretched out until it became awkward, at least for Sam. Huhn seemed lost in his own thoughts. Finally he looked up.

  “Once it was done and I had time to think, I figured I made an awful mistake, giving up command. I was always an ambitious man, but not . . . well, not crazy. Not unrealistic. Never thought I’d retire with an admiral’s star. Captain of a cruiser—that was the pinnacle of my ambition. Four broad stripes on my sleeve.”

  “It must have been a difficult decision,” Sam said, although the words tasted trite to him as soon as he spoke them. Huhn looked at him for a moment but Sam could not read his expression. Huhn’s face seemed blank, as if the life had left him.

  “Threw my future away,” Huhn said after a moment, and then he looked around the cabin he had briefly occupied. “No getting it back. Hated you for a while, for doing what I couldn’t. Still do, a little bit . . . hate you, I mean.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say so he said nothing. He wished he’d poured them bulbs of coffee, water, something to
keep his hands occupied.

  “I’ve been reading about the Royal Navy,” Huhn said, “back in the olden days, the Age of Fighting Sail. Know much about it?”

  Sam shook his head,

  “The ships had contingents of Marines, for boarding actions and such, commanded by a sergeant or a lieutenant on the smaller ships. On the big ships of the line those Marines were commanded by a captain. But onboard the ship he was always addressed as major. You know why?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because a ship can only have one captain.”

  Huhn took the box from under his arm and handed it to Sam, who took it with a measure of reluctance. Gifts suggested obligations. An unknown gift carried an unknown burden of obligation. He opened the box and saw a bottle of bourbon.

  “Booker Beam,” Huhn said. “Seven years old. About as good as it gets.”

  “I don’t. . . ”

  “It’s not for you, Bitka. Not personally, anyway. It’s for the captain, in case you want to share a drink with your officers.”

  Sam stared at the bottle, uncertain what he should say or do about this, uncertain in fact how he felt about it.

  “Will you . . . will you have a drink with me, Commander Huhn?”

  “Nope. I’m not one of the ship’s officers any more, just a passenger.” He unbuckled himself from the chair and Sam felt his face flush.

  “I regret that remark, sir.”

  “It was the truth, and it needed saying. Don’t be sorry for that. Besides, it means I don’t need permission to leave.”

  He pushed off the wall and left the cabin.

  Sam stared at the bottle of bourbon. What was going on in Huhn’s head? Was this gesture well-intended or ill? Did Huhn himself know? Sam shook his head.

  “Back home we got an expression for a guy like Admiral Kayumati,” Moe Rice said with the careful enunciation characteristic both of his West Texas accent and of a drunk. “All hat, no cattle.”