Ship of Destiny Read online

  Mikko couldn’t remember a captain having dinner with enlisted personnel, especially petty officers first and second class—acey-deucies—just to get acquainted, but she liked the idea.

  “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

  The lift came to a halt, the door behind her slid open, and Mikko saw the captain’s eyes widen with surprise. She turned and saw the two vaguely reptilian figures waiting in the corridor.

  Varoki were surprisingly similar to Humans in structure and even facial features, despite standing over two meters tall, being hairless and iridescent-skinned, and sporting broad, leaflike, constantly moving ears. Dr. Däng, the famous xenophysiologist, who was also on the VIP passenger list, had told her the similarities were due to “easiest path engineering.” Mikko wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “Captain Bitka, let me introduce the Honorable Limi e-Lisyss, diplomatic trade mediation envoy from the executive council of the Cottohazz to the Toomish Consortium of Buran. And this is his assistant, Mister Haykuz.”

  Captain Bitka extended his hand and the envoy e-Lisyss’s eyes widened slightly. The assistant took a small step forward, his skin flushing pink with embarrassment.

  “The envoy means no disrespect, Captain Bitka,” he explained hastily, “but the human custom of shaking hands is not widely practiced among our people.”

  The captain lowered his hand and shrugged. “No offense taken.” He turned and smiled at Mikko. “Funny. Didn’t seem to bother the uBakai naval officers I met a couple weeks ago, and we’re still technically at war with them.”

  Mikko had already decided that e-Lisyss’s personality was an odd fit for a diplomat, since he seemed a master at either giving or taking offense at fairly minor things, but maybe he was really hell on wheels when it came to closing a good trade deal. Who knew?

  She had wondered how the captain felt about Varoki in general, and specifically the uBakai whom he had fought in the war. Apparently, he’d at least been willing to shake their hands, and she hadn’t seen any obvious sign of animosity.

  “The envoy has asked me to inquire why he was not invited to the meeting of senior officers, as he is the most senior official of the Cottohazz aboard the vessel,” the assistant asked.

  The captain frowned and glanced at Mikko before answering.

  “I wasn’t aware your boss was on board until about one minute ago.”

  The assistant and the envoy exchanged a few words in aHoka, which Mikko could recognize from its guttural consonants but could not understand.

  “The envoy accepts your apology,” the assistant said. “He suggests we now go and meet our officers.”

  Captain Bitka scratched his close-cropped hair and then shook his head.

  “Nope. No offense to your boss but they aren’t our officers, they’re mine. I understand he’s a high-ranking official of the Cottohazz but we aren’t operating under Cottohazz authority. This is a United States Navy vessel and you’re riding with us as a courtesy, one we are happy to extend. I’ll be glad to talk with him later but right now my executive officer and I have to be going. Excuse us.”

  Mikko hastened to keep up with Captain Bitka’s long strides without jostling either of the Varoki officials as she passed them. She expected to hear outraged protests but for whatever reason they said nothing. Maybe part of diplomacy was knowing how to preserve your dignity when you lost a round.

  How had the captain known the Varoki wouldn’t force the issue? Or had he? Maybe he just didn’t care. Whichever it was, she liked it. Varoki were always trying to throw their weight around. Fortunately, they were as divided into competing nations, alliances, and factions as were humans, and every other intelligent species of the Cottohazz. Even divided, they were still the top dogs. In the war they had just finished the Outworld Coalition of four different human nations—The United States of North America, the West European Union, India, and Nigeria—had nearly lost fighting just one Varoki nation, the uBakai. If the Varoki ever all got together and buried the hatchet, it would get ugly.

  “So Little Sis and Haiku, what’s their story?” the captain asked once they passed beyond a bulkhead.

  Mikko struggled to keep her face neutral. Giggling at the two nicknames would be undignified.

  “Sir, they call e-Lisyss a trade mediation envoy. As I understand his function, he goes around strong-arming people over royalty rates for the big Varoki trading houses, but he does it with a Cottohazz official title and expense account. He’s smart, but cold as a polar ice cap. Haykuz, his assistant, is an arrogant little weasel without near as much going on upstairs. That translation stuff was probably an act. I bet e-Lisyss was running high-level auto-trans through his commlink.”

  “He was,” the captain said. “You could see in his eyes he understood us.”

  Mikko glanced quickly at him. She hadn’t noticed that.

  “They never tried pulling rank like that on Captain O’Malley,” she said. “I think they were trying to snow the new guy, but you didn’t fall for it. All due respect to Admiral Stevens, sir, but he should have at least told you about those two.”

  Captain Bitka smiled. “Maybe he figured this would be more fun.”

  It sounded as if the captain had a complicated relationship with the fleet commander. Mikko had never met anyone who knew a fleet commander well enough for their relationship to be complicated.

  “Here’s the wardroom, sir.” She followed him in.

  “Attention!” she called out and the dozen officers present, already standing in anticipation of their new captain’s arrival, snapped to.

  “As you were,” Captain Bitka said.

  “With your permission, sir, let me introduce your department heads.”

  She did so in order of seniority. Like her, they were all full lieutenants so date of commission counted: Ka’Deem Brook from operations, Rosemary Acho from logistics, Koichi Ma from engineering, and Homer Alexander from tactical. Also like her they were all about thirty years old, plus or minus a couple years, except for Rosemary Acho who was closer to forty. She was a mustang: enlisted as a common mariner, rose to the rank of chief petty officer, and was then commissioned.

  Mikko watched the captain carefully for insights into how he sized up his senior officers. She knew—well, she’d heard gossip—that he had little use for Annapolis-educated regular officers and even less for astrogators. She saw no evidence of either in his greeting of Ka’Deem Brook, their chief astrogator and the only academy graduate—other than herself—among the department heads. If the captain had already memorized The Bay’s deck plan, he surely had read the service jackets of his senior officers.

  Did he recognize in Brook, the Ops boss, the crippling need to avoid conflict at all costs? Did he see their TAC boss, Lieutenant Alexander, as the cocksure loner who had become nearly unbearable since learning their new captain was the most famous Tac-head in the navy? Did he see Acho as self-conscious and unsure of herself, hiding her doubts behind a wall of authority and neurotic attention to administrative minutiae? Did he see Ma as a talented engineer too lazy to do the work himself and uninterested in supervising his subordinates? If he saw any of that, he sure could keep a secret.

  And what does he see when he looks at me?

  Mikko introduced Major J. C. Merderet last, because as a Marine she was not technically a member of the crew, but rather a passenger. Merderet was the only one of them who had met Bitka before, and she had told all of them about the meeting as soon as they heard about his posting as their new captain. The meeting had taken place on K’tok after the ceasefire.

  “Introduced himself to every officer and command NCO in the cohort,” she said, “and thanked us for the job we did. Only Navy officer who ever did. He said he was sorry they hadn’t done more to help. After the beating they took, can you imagine that?”

  Mikko wondered if Bitka even remembered the encounter.

  “I believe you already have met Major Merderet,” Mikko said. “She’s commanding our embarked Marine contingent
.”

  Mikko saw Bitka’s face brighten and Merderet even managed a rare smile in reply.

  “Last time we met weren’t you wearing captain’s bars?” Bitka said as they shook hands. “Congratulations on the promotion. How’d they pry you loose from the 24th MEU-MIC?”

  “Brought it with me sir,” she answered. “Two companies of it anyway.”

  “Really? We’re carrying two companies of Mike Marines? Jesus! I knew we had some grunts but I thought it was an embassy guard detail or something.”

  “My orders say the Buran want a demonstration of concept, sir,” she said. “We’re going to do six company-sized meteoric inserts from orbit to show them how it’s done. Not sure why, but that’s not my department.”

  “Nope, mine neither,” the captain answered. “After that fight on K’tok, I thought the 24th earned a rest.”

  “Well sir, some might have said the same about you. I guess they decided sitting on our asses eating Crab a la K’tok for eight weeks was rest enough. You ever figure out why the hell the Navy does stuff, you let me know.”

  To Mikko’s surprise, Captain Bitka laughed and nodded. Between a Marine NCO and a Navy petty officer, those would nearly have been fighting words, but watching the easy banter between Bitka and Merderet, Mikko realized those two really were on the same team.

  The Twenty-Fourth MEU-MIC—short for Marine Expeditionary Unit, Meteoric Insertion Capable—had been one of the two “Mike” cohorts that inserted from orbit in individual reentry pods and captured the capital and needle downstation on K’tok at the start of the recent war. That was already talked about as the most audacious operation in modern military history—anyone’s modern military history. Merderet had commanded a rifle company in the first assault wave.

  Mikko knew Merderet and the captain hadn’t met until after the fighting was over, but whatever experience they held in common had rendered them comrades in a way that made her ashamed—not because she had not been there to share it. That was beyond her control. She was ashamed because she was jealous of them. She was certain they’d both lost people they cared about in that fight, and that was nothing to envy, and doing so was a shameful thing, but she still did.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Six days later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay

  16 February 2134 (the day of Incident Seventeen)

  Six days after assuming command of USS Cam Ranh Bay, Sam still wasn’t sure he had a handle on the ship, but he was making progress, and he had time. After all, the war was over, at least for the time being.

  The Bay, as he’d learned most of the crew called her, was a long, thick composite alloy cylinder, twenty-two meters in diameter and one hundred thirty-five meters long, plus a spin habitat wheel a hundred meters in diameter, spinning around its midsection. The spin habitat gave them one-gee living spaces while most of the machinery and working spaces were in the cylindrical main hull: engineering, auxiliary bridge, and missile room aft, docking bay and small craft amidships, bulk storage, point defense lasers, sensor suite, and main control room forward, and HRM—Hydrogen Reaction Mass—tankage everywhere. Four great big radiators stuck out of the aft part of the main hull like fins. In fact, they were fins when they skimmed the atmosphere of a gas giant to scoop hydrogen reaction mass, the preferred method of refueling.

  The Bay was an ugly ship unless you liked designs which stressed utility over aesthetics, and if you did, it had a certain beauty. Well, a certain handsomeness. Beauty stretched the point.

  That first day, only hours after the assumption of command ceremony, they had broken orbit around K’tok, accelerated for six hours at an economical twentieth of a gee, and then coasted out toward Mogo, the system’s gas giant. Cam Ranh Bay’s HRM tanks were nearly full so there was no need to scoop fuel from Mogo’s atmosphere, but the calculated jump point was out between the orbits of the two planets and so off they went.

  As they broke orbit Sam had every internal smart wall in the common spaces set to show the external view. The shattered wrecks of six human starships, the graves of over two thousand naval personnel, still bore silent witness to the catastrophe that had been the First Battle of K’tok. That had been on Christmas Eve last year, less than two months ago. It seemed like a lifetime.

  The surprise of the uBakai fleet emerging from J-space that close to the world—the sheer crazy gutsiness of the move from the normally conservative, predictable Varoki—had been bad enough. But when the Varoki let loose their new jump scrambler weapon, when cruisers and transports began folding in on themselves as their own interstellar jump drives ate them up . . .

  Sam shuddered and shook himself to drive away the memories. No, not the memories. He wanted to remember. He just didn’t need the visceral immediacy of that experience repeated over and over. Sam had commanded USS Puebla, a destroyer, too small to have a jump drive. That had saved him then. Now he was commanding a starship, complete with jump drive. But the war was over, right?

  The day Sam took command of the Bay, they had passed by those derelict ghost ships.

  The day after Sam took command, he got lost.

  Well, he knew about where he was. He was weightless in the main hull at frame forty-four, just forward of “the narrows,” where the spin habitat’s machinery was located along with the power rings. The docking bay and engineering were aft, launch bays, dead storage, and control room were forward. The problem was the access corridor dead-ended into a “T” intersection and he wasn’t sure whether the best way forward was to port or starboard.

  A crewperson happened by, introduced herself as Signaler Mate Second Class Lucinda Weaver, and showed him “the shortest way” to the bridge, which was a tactful way of giving directions. He’d thanked her, but then got lost again, this time deliberately. He spent over three hours wandering through the Bay, “inspecting” to anyone he encountered, but in truth exploring. He’d spent a lot of the following five days doing the same, not just learning the ship but also meeting the crew, talking to them at his scheduled meals but also as they manned their maneuvering watch stations. Between that and his regular duties as captain he worked full days, long days, and did so deliberately. He wanted to turn in each night bone tired, so sleep would come quickly, more quickly than all those unanswered questions about Cassandra.

  Now, six days after taking command, he walked down the broad central corridor of the habitat wheel, made way for a twelve-Marine squad in PT gear running in step and formation, and then continued to the lift that would take him up to the main hull. From there he’d make his way forward to the bridge to take over the watch. He knew the way well now, thanks to his wanderings. He’d discovered something else in those wanderings: USS Cam Ranh Bay was not a happy ship.

  He’d served on happy ships, ships where the crew had confidence in themselves, in their officers and chiefs, in the physical ship itself, and most importantly in the captain. Something was wrong with the Bay, something he couldn’t put his finger on yet. It wasn’t an unhappy ship, not exactly, but it was an unsettled ship, an anxious ship.

  Part of the problem might have been his predecessor, Captain O’Malley, a fifty-two-year-old O-5 commander who had already been passed over for promotion to O-6 once and had been facing possible retirement before the war broke out. No one had said anything against him, either on the ship or before he’d arrived, but the Navy was like that. Have an affair and everyone talked about it. Have a run of bad luck or questionable decisions and people would start avoiding you. But if you just coasted along, didn’t do anything really wrong, no one would cluck their tongue. In that respect the Navy was like life itself: almost by definition mediocrity was not noteworthy. There didn’t seem to have been anything particularly wrong with O’Malley, but maybe nothing particularly right either.

  Also like life in general, the higher up the Navy’s chain of command you ventured, the more empty suits you found, men like Vice Admiral Stevens who had risen without the handicap of ever having had a conviction which was more strongly held than
one by his immediate superior. As their superiors had themselves risen mostly by the same means, the end results were depressing to contemplate, but thoroughly predictable.

  Sam felt the spin-induced gravity decline as the lift carried him up to the main hull. Cam Ranh Bay was over three times the tonnage of Puebla, his previous command, although the main hull wasn’t much bigger. Over half the extra tonnage was in the massive spin habitat wheel, big enough to hold the crew as well as a full cohort of Marines and a slice of a brigade-support echelon. By the time the lift came to a rest, Sam floated free in the car and kicked off from the wall when the door opened. He could have used his shoe and hand magnets but after months on Puebla he was well-accustomed to zero-gee movement. He headed forward toward the bridge, passing through “the narrows.” He had to slide to one side to get past a maintenance crew working on one of the power routers.

  Aside from Captain O’Malley, there were problems with the ship itself. Cam Ranh Bay had been commissioned eleven months earlier, the third in the Peleliu class of fast assault transports, but she had missed the fighting due to teething problems. In a way that had probably saved her—a little over a month earlier her sister ship USS Peleliu had been lost with almost all hands, along with the bulk of Task Force One.

  The power ring—the superconducting magnetic energy storage system—was the Bay’s main problem. It stored energy for the interstellar jump and consisted of four separate rings or cells wrapped around the main hull forward of engineering. But there was something faulty with the energy routers which linked them together, troublesome enough that the ship’s alternate nickname was Building Seventeen, a sarcastic reference to how seldom it had left the repair docks until recently. Maybe some in the crew felt relief that a faulty power ring had kept them away from the disaster with Task Force One, but it had kept them out of the relief force which came later as well. It was hard to love a ship you couldn’t count on.

  And the leadership? A mixed bag. As near as he could tell in the short time he’d been in command, he had a good set of chiefs and no obvious weak spots in the junior officers. The department heads didn’t work as a team, though. Each one ran his or her own shop and didn’t bother much about the others. He hadn’t run into any serious conflict so it might just be a case of incompatible personalities and empire building, but that was worrisome enough.