More removed a data tablet from the lectern beside him. “I am casting your assignment for the next class. I want you to explore one instance in which you believe that the commanding officer either erred or made the correct choice and explain where you come down on the matter. I will see you Wednesday.”
There was a shuffling of tablets, papers, and other gear as the cadets scrambled to leave. Cadet Hu stood and raised her hand. “Admiral More, may I be recognized?”
“Of course, Cadet Hu. What is it?” The other cadets stopped what they were doing, grumbling at being delayed, and sat back down in their seats.
“The last two years saw you having to make several difficult decisions. You were at the center of the Morrigan recovery operation, and then later you led the attack that destroyed Victory Base. Both of them involved many tough calls. I was wondering how you squared a decision you made with your insistence that the overriding concern of a naval officer is the strategic security of the Republic. I’m not suggesting that you didn’t do that, not at all, I’d like a good grade in this class, you see.” This was followed by ripples of laughter from Hu’s fellow cadets.
“Nonetheless, I wonder,” Hu continued. “I think it was a bold decision to go after the Tartarean base in the enemy’s home system. I don’t think I would have had the guts to try something so spectacular myself. Every instinct would have told me to either sit tight and wait for instructions or head to Aramis and form a defensive line there. You didn’t do either. I am glad that we think alike about Hudson’s Moons, but I am disturbed that I can’t fathom your decision to go after Victory Base.”
More had fielded this question, in one variation or another, many times over the last ten months, ever since he had returned to Halifax to a hero’s welcome by the public and a top secret court-martial by the Navy brass. With just four ships he’d displaced into the home system of the Monarchonate and vaporized the enemy’s primary starbase.
That was what had been let out to the public, when the Navy decided to adopt More’s freelance mission once its stunning success had become known. More had been acting without orders. Without direction. He had made a huge decision on his own, with just the assent of his three captains of the 34th Strike Squadron to back him up. On his own, he’d run a gigantic risk, of four precious warships and their crews, all in a desperate bid to restore the RHN to the superiority it had prior to the Armada of Tartarus’s own, devastating attack on Galicia Base, the Navy’s biggest station.
More also had wanted revenge. He’d met King Evander and had been frightened to the core of his being by the man. The Sphinx, as he was called by many, possessed a certainty of purpose that had unnerved More. When news of the damage done to Galicia had arrived in the Dora system, More had not waited for orders. He had decided to hit back. He’d allowed himself to be convinced that an immediate attack on Victory Base was the right thing to do. He had wanted to believe, and he had. In retrospect, More felt like a fool, having made his decision when his blood was up.
The operation had been the brainchild of Cordelia, the ancient AI warship. Through a combination of superior speed and some necessary luck, More’s squadron had arrived in Tartarus before the slower-moving AT ships, which had thought themselves to be at peace. They weren’t. The Sphinx had engineered in the meanwhile an incident in which it had been made to look like More had destroyed three Tartarean freighters. It was all done to make it look like the Galicia Base attack was retaliatory, instead of a premeditated violation of the peace treaty that had just been signed by the Sphinx and Halifax’s prime minister, Alexander Montluc.
Cordelia had departed from the agreed-upon plan as soon as she had spotted the Armada fleet in Tartarus lumbering home from its fight in the Memnon system. Victory Base had been annihilated when the AI, uninterested in surviving the encounter, had taken on the Armada ships on her own and, in a display of technical virtuosity, had displaced in a micro-jump that brought her and most of her victims to Victory’s doorstep, where they slammed into the base and atomized it.
More could disclose none of that to the cadets. He stuck to the story as it had been set out for him by the Admiralty.
“It was a difficult decision, to say the least, Cadet Hu. I had my orders, which had brought my squadron to the Dora system. As you have learned, the events that transpired there were part of King Evander’s plot to make it appear that I was the one who had restarted the war. When word arrived of the atrocity at Galicia Base, I felt that I could not fail to act. It was clear to us that we could get to Tartarus before the AT ships that were leaving Memnon did. Even though they had a head start, if we pushed ourselves, we could arrive before them. I thought that, after weighing everything, that risking my four ships was worth the hurt we could do to the enemy. There is a time and place for the conservative course of action, and also a time when you have to roll the dice. This was an emergency, and my action was proper under the circumstances as they existed. We were more fortunate than we could have imagined.”
Maybe a century hence the truth of the Strike on Victory Base would come out. Probably not.
Cadet Hu nodded. She didn’t seem convinced by More’s explanation and if he had been in her place, he would not have been either. More had made an unforgivably bad decision that had turned out well. Fortune had favored him. He could not have counted on Cordelia’s suicidal behavior, and that, in the end, was all that had made the mission successful.
The admirals, with the people of Halifax greeting him as a conquering hero when he came home, had been unable to censure him publicly. They promoted him to the rank of rear admiral to make it look like he’d been acting, if not under specific orders, then according to the overall directives of High Command. Privately, the livid admirals had made it plain to him that he’d never hold a spacegoing command again. He would teach his history classes at Cold Bay for a few years. Then, he would retire and never have any further dealings with the Navy, which would forever blame him for the loss of the priceless Cordelia.
*****
More retreated to his office in the Academy’s Department of History. He had a spacious office, one larger than most. A corner office too, one that was coveted by most of the other faculty. He had a prized parking spot for his gravcar close to the entrance in the faculty parking lot. That too was highly prized. More found academics and their obsessions inexplicable.
He enjoyed teaching his classes. His teaching load was light, just two this semester, and they were interesting. In addition to Modern Naval History, he was teaching a seminar on interstellar diplomacy. He had gained enormous authority on the subject as the man who had stared down the Sphinx in a one-on-one meeting on Sorrento orbital the year before. Halifax itself had not sought to publicize the meeting. It had been Tartarus’s own media that had made it public knowledge across the Great Sphere. Likely it had been done with an eye to making More himself appear to be an angry and unhinged captain who would stop at nothing, such as destroying merchant freighters, in his bid to hurt Tartarus and its king.
It was all ludicrous of course. That didn’t prevent the Tartarean propaganda machine from continuing to pump out dark theories about More or his motives. Fortunately, the mood in Halifax was such that none would accept anything that came out of Tartarus at face value. There was none of the sniping that had been seen in the Halifaxian media in the aftermath of the Memnon incident. More was happy that he was not being blamed any longer for the war. That was a terrible charge to have leveled at oneself, especially when you were forbidden to reveal the full story because most of it would remain classified for another century or more.
His students were in awe of him. He was a war hero and a living legend. The other professors on the staff deferred to him and admired his status as a uniquely successful naval commander. The ‘Strike on Victory Base’ was already being taught as part of the Naval Tactics class that all cadets took in their first years.
None of the other professors knew what had really happened in Tartarus. They had been k
ept in the dark as much as their students had been. More removed a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet and poured himself a glass. He downed it in one gulp. Then another. Now that he was planetside, he was no longer bound by the Navy’s stricture’s against imbibing during duty hours. He tended to reach for the bottle when his doubts resurfaced. That had been happening with greater frequency of late.
More was aware of all that had transpired. He did not delude himself. He had made a questionable decision that had turned out well, when all was weighed in the balance. So was he still a hero? Did he deserve the praise and adulation that he regularly received, a year later?
He had not come to a certain answer. He doubted that he ever would. His rashness had taken his squadron into the heart of enemy territory. His ships might have done little more than scratch Victory Base, such was the stoutness of its shields and the multiplicity of ships it could deploy in its defense. Cordelia had taken it upon herself to take as many of the Armada’s ships down with her as she could. The trick that she had employed with her displacement envelope to move so many ships over such a short distance, that had been kept well-hidden from the RHN all these years. Or perhaps Cordelia had never hidden it. Maybe she herself had not known it was possible until she had learned that the battleship Lady of the Lake had done it. Surprise.
There was a chime. A holo, in full color, as this was a planetside RHN facility and not subject to the data restrictions that limited warships to uniformly blue-white holograms, appeared above More’s desk, off to the right. It was the deeply-etched visage of an older man, dressed in the uniform of an admiral of the Republic of Halifax Navy. He looked concerned. More waited before he swiped to accept the call, his hand hovering in mid-air.
Sven Mallory had been one of the strongest voices for tossing More out of the Navy for his mission to Tartarus. A bare majority of the other admirals at the court-martial had disagreed, not because they approved of what More had done, but because it was politically impossible for the naval service to drum out the biggest hero that Halifax had seen in several generations. Further, the devastating blow that he had struck against Tartarus, they argued, had at the least removed any political pressure that the Halifaxian government would have faced in the wake of the ruin of Galicia to hit back with atomics.
The Accords that governed ‘civilized’ warfare in the Great Sphere outlawed the use of weapons of mass destruction, a capacious term that included everything from atomics to rocks dropped from orbit upon population centers to ultra-high-speed attacks of the kind that had been visited upon the RHN naval base. A simple hunk of steel accelerated to very high velocities would have much the same destructive impact as a nuke, and so that thinking was that it ought to be treated as if it were a nuke. So Tartarus had been in technical violation of the Accords, and the military lawyers with High Command were of the opinion that a Republican retaliatory strike with weapons of mass destruction was justified under interstellar law.
Problem was, none of the politicians in Hamilton wanted to get involved in something like that, and More’s action had saved them from having to massively retaliate just to show that the Accords were being upheld, and had teeth. So More kept his job, and a bitterly-divided High Command had also decided to give him a promotion to flag rank because the public expected it. That was just another thing that stuck in Mallory’s craw.
There may have been a bit more to the court-martial’s forbearance than an unwillingness to buck public opinion or the political benefit of the strike. More came from a Navy family going back several generations. He'd lived a good portion of his early life in Cold Bay, where his father, Admiral Cecil More, had himself held a teaching position during his childhood. The admirals may have gone easy on him, to their way of thinking, because of his late father. Every one of them had taken his class on interstellar relations. Most of them remembered him with real affection. Cecil had been a popular officer, with an easy charm and self-confidence that never veered into arrogance. His son was likely benefiting from the residual warmth that some of them felt for his old man. At least two of the admirals on the secret court-martial jury had been guests at the More family table at Cold Bay on occasion.
One of the ways that the young Andrew More initially had chosen to rebel was to refuse any thought of following in the footsteps of his father, grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandfather, all of whom had been Navy people. Andrew had declared himself a pacifist and would not look at an application to take the entrance exam to the Republican Naval Academy.
That refusal had been followed by a year of wandering around the systems of the Republic. He hopped aboard a liner, the Bountiful Stars, and allowed it to take him on a tour of the Republic. He persuaded his father to fund his journey, telling him that he would vacuum up everything of historical significance he could find. It was exploration of the history of the Great Sphere, he had claimed. His father had ponied up the money and off he had gone.
Andrew first backpacked his way across the planets of the Halifax system, then made his way to the outer star systems. He had chafed against the formality of Navy life, what with all of its saluting, and yes, sir, yes, ma'am, hierarchical nonsense. Young Andrew was not one for appreciating chains of command and the superior-inferior relations that governed all aspects of military life.
His declared purpose was not completely bogus. He had long been interested in ancient history, and had decided that the colonial period of Halifax proper would be his area of study once he returned home and matriculated at a civilian university. He would then go on to obtain a doctorate in history and afterward teach at one of Hamilton's better institutions of higher learning. That was the plan.
The frontier systems were different from anything he'd experienced in Halifax. They had been revelations. Cold Bay may have exuded security, but the border worlds often had the feeling of being planetary-sized military camps. Naval officers and marines didn't wear dress uniforms. They were always in duty fatigues. They were constantly going out on missions, hunting pirates, or chasing off interlopers from other states.
The worst among the latter were the Ajaxians, and the hardest hit frontier system had been Aramis. Ajaxian raiders, disguised as buccaneers in a subterfuge that fooled no one, had been hitting the colonies there for several years by the time Andrew had made his way there. There had been no political will in Halifax to bring down the hammer on the Ajaxian government that was behind the attacks. Taking on a rival state, one that Halifax was clearly superior to, was not something that anyone wanted to contemplate. War didn't win votes, and no politician wanted to be the one to push for anything more potent than some small-scale counterattacks against the Domain's outlying systems.
Life there was rougher too. Cold Bay was highly privileged, despite the military overlay, in comparison. True, life wasn't soft for all on Halifax. His cousin Julius, from the Howell branch of the family, had not had it easy, but his lot had been better than the hardscrabble existence of most on the frontier. Aramis was a cross between a colony system and a garrison state. Despite the troubles and hardships they faced, he found the Aramisians refreshingly down to earth and willing to speak their minds. The daily struggle left little time for the posturing of so much of civilian life in the more fortunate inner systems of the Republic. Then he got to see the damage that the Ajaxians did to the most exposed of the colonies. Despite its best efforts, the RHN could not be everywhere, and the raiders had the advantage of deciding when and where to strike. The extent of space that had to be patrolled made a preclusive defense impossible. The RHN was often left trying to catch the raiders before they could jump out of the system and escape with whatever they had stolen.
Ajaxian contraband often included captives, destined to be worked to death in mines or factories inside the Domain. This in itself had not been a revelation to More. It was common knowledge that such things happened. Again, the political will to teach the barbarians of Ajax a lesson they wouldn't forget was lacking. RHN officers would retaliate whenever and wher
ever they could, but a decisive blow could not be struck if prime minister after prime minister would not approve of more forceful measures.
Andrew had thereafter traveled outside of the Republic's borders. If there was difficulty on Halifax's frontiers, it paled in comparison to what he found outside them. Memnon had been troubled by pirates and Ajaxians posing as the same to a greater degree than any system of the Republic.
Then came Corinth Station. Most people in the Great Sphere simply called it the Massacre. In that context, everyone understood what you were talking about. The entire population of an elderly, defenseless orbital had been cut down by Ajaxian troops. The death toll had been in the tens of thousands. There had been no discernible point to the Massacre beyond the spreading of terror. Corinth Station became a byword for wanton slaughter. The atrocity had ended any hopes, such as they had existed, that Ajax might mellow over time or that its appalling behavior would lessen as it made the climb from barbarism to civilization. Those naive beliefs died at Corinth Station, along with the civilian victims.
More had been on Tiryns in the Memnon system when news of the Massacre had reached his ears. He cut short his hike in the planet's fabled Whitepeak Mountains and hopped aboard the first ship, the Emeritus Conveyor, that was heading to Corinth Station. It was an old freighter carrying livestock to one of the colony worlds that shared the system with the orbital. The whole place reeked of cattle, goats, sheep, and alpacas, but the fare was dirt-cheap, and the captain promised to get him in-system two days ahead of any other ship heading that way.
The Ajax Incursion Page 4
