“I am not Deearan,” the Drex woman insisted. “I followed my Warlord’s orders because I had no choice. With my Warlord dead, the choice is mine.”
“Convince me to trust you, Captain,” Henry said gently. “Right now, I see a woman we captured attacking this ship who has admitted to acting as a pirate. Why should I see anything else?”
She started to snarl at him…and then stopped herself. She closed her eyes and several seconds passed in silence.
“I can speak for the other Captains that remain,” she noted, slowly and with forced calm in her tone. “We were the replacements for the officers Deearan spaced. The other Captains were Deearan’s people from long ago. We knew we would die if we defied the Warlord.
“But Deearan is dead. Killed aboard their ship when you wrecked her. The Captains who willingly followed them into piracy are dead. We will not repeat the mistakes of the past. I swear this.”
“Even if I am willing to believe you, I need more proof than your word,” Henry told her. “Tell me everything, Captain Attallis. You fired new missiles at my ship. Where did they come from?”
“New missiles?” she stared at him, and then slammed a hand onto the table in frustration. “That monster. I understand now, I think.”
“Explain, Captain Attallis,” Todorovich ordered.
“We met with a Drifter Convoy some weeks ago. Not in this star system but another,” she told them. “We traded our stolen goods for supplies…including missiles. We had expended most of those we stole with the ships against the Kenmiri when we were truly Vesheron.
“We acquired more missiles than I had expected, but…one did not question the First Warlord. They must have cut a deal.”
That made a lot of sense to Henry. The Drifters had been an accepted not-quite-dissident faction in the Kenmiri Empire, a group of aliens who’d left their homeworlds and lived on a collection of borrowed, bought and stolen skip-drive-capable freighters. Nomads, they’d made their way in the Kenmiri Empire by moving from system to system and trading goods as they traveled.
Even while remaining officially uninvolved, the Drifter Convoys had been one of the key sources of munitions and supplies for many Vesheron. They’d also hosted several covert Vesheron R&D programs along with their own research.
If an anti-grav-shield weapon had been developed by someone other than the Kenmiri, it would have either been the El-Vesheron or hidden among the Drifters.
“Were you specifically told that the missiles were meant for use against the UPA?” Henry asked.
“No,” Attallis insisted. “Outside the moment of conflict, we may have been able to oppose Deearan if they had told us that. They did not tell us why we were in this particular system or even that we were hunting a particular vessel, if we were seeking your ship.”
“Would anyone left know?” Todorovich demanded. “Any of the survivors?”
“Deearan did not share their thoughts outside their chosen Captains,” Attallis admitted. “We junior captains were not trusted enough to know their plans, and no one below Captain was worthy to.”
Henry liked this First Warlord less and less the more he heard about them.
“Do you know which Drifter Convoy?” he asked. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about it on this trip, but he could put the information in UPA hands.
“Red Stripe Blue Stripe Black Stripe,” the Drex officer told him. She put her hands together in what would have been a praying gesture for a Terran.
“If you release me and my people, I will provide you with everything we have in our files. You already have my recorded testimony for the Gathering. My ships and people…we must find a patron. A home, out here…not a hunting ground.”
I think she’s telling the truth, Todorovich sent Henry over their networks. Her files and her testimony will be a useful tool at the Gathering, especially if someone is moving against us.
Of course someone is moving against us, he replied. The only question is who. She seems straightforward enough, but she could also be playing us.
We don’t lose if she is, the Ambassador argued. I’d prefer not to leave pirates behind us, but I’m not willing to order mass executions. Are you?
Not unless I must, he conceded. What are you thinking?
Trintar has managed to pull themselves together quite well near here, Todorovich told him. Two Vesheron factions turned a relatively even balance of power into a combined military force and what’s shaping up to be a functional civilian government. They’ll be at the Gathering. If we send her to them, we’ll know if she actually comes in from the cold and buy ourselves some goodwill with a potential ally.
You’re the Ambassador, Henry said. That is definitely a diplomatic decision.
“Are you aware of the system Trintar?” Todorovich asked.
Unaware of their network conversation, Attallis looked confused again.
“I think so,” she said slowly. “The Kenmiri had a logistics base there that we raided before I became a Captain.”
“The leaders there have combined two groups of Vesheron into a new system military under a civilian government,” the Ambassador told her. “The UPA is in contact with them. If you go to Trintar from here with the three ships you can retrieve and place yourselves under their command, we will not pass on your confessions of piracy. We will still use your testimony about the First Warlord and the attempt to intercept us, but we will allow you a fresh start.”
“The Ambassador wishes for you to become warriors again instead of pirates,” Henry said firmly. “We will know if you betray us, Captain Attallis, and will provide Trintar and the other local governments with everything we have learned about your ships if you do.
“Do you understand?”
“I understand,” she confirmed. “I will convince my people to do as you ask. It seems…a better option than continuing the First Warlord’s plan.” She grimaced. “The First Warlord would never have accepted being a subordinate. I see no problem with it.”
“Good.” Henry pinged the guards to let them know that Attallis would be leaving the room unrestrained after all. “Our troops will remain on your ships for a while longer, though.
“You understand that we must avoid unnecessary risks, after all.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Ser…I can’t get ahold of the XO, and we need a senior officer in the officers’ mess ASAP.”
The noncom speaking in Henry’s internal network sounded about as apologetic as a human could physically be. Given that the speaker was a second-class Petty Officer assigned to the mess, the likelihood that they’d started their calls as high as the XO was pretty low.
If they’d managed to bounce their way up to the Captain, the noncom was having a bad day—and with just about everyone of importance already racked out after the battle, Henry wasn’t entirely surprised.
“I’ll be right there,” he promised.
He understood, intellectually, that the adrenaline surge of battle left most people feeling wrung out and needing to rest. That was part of why Ihejirika was holding down the watch while most of the senior officers were unconscious, after all.
Henry, on the other hand, took a lot longer to come down from that high than most people he’d known. It was useful in combat, but it also meant that he spent several hours pacing his quarters after a battle, waiting for his body and mind to relax enough to either sleep or do work that didn’t need adrenaline.
His quarters weren’t as close to the officer’s mess as they were to the bridge, but he made it there within two minutes of getting the call. It turned out that a good chunk of the other officers who couldn’t sleep after a fight had decided to deal with it with booze or food.
There were a dozen officers in the mess and two stewards under the supervision of PO Tasia Guarneri. The two stewards were giving the center of the bar a wide berth as Guarneri braved the storm radius of drunken pilots.
Three of them—including, Henry realized with a mental sigh, Commander Samira O’Flann
again. An inevitable Brownian motion had seen the other nine officers in the room move their chairs and tables away from O’Flannagain and her people.
“Another!” O’Flannagain bellowed, slamming a glass down on the table. “Hell, a round for everyone!”
“Ser, I’m sorry, but I have to cut you off,” Guarneri said. Her gaze was focused on Henry as she spoke though, and he could read the silent pleading in her eyes.
“What, is my account not paid up?” O’Flannagain demanded aggressively. “I put good money in the damn system so that you can feed me booze without asking questions, Petty Officer! Now get me a damn bottle.”
“Don’t get her the bottle,” Henry told Guarneri calmly. “The Commander’s liquor privileges are revoked until further notice. Completely.”
It was amazing, he noticed, how fast even drunk pilots disappeared when the Captain showed up. Suddenly, he and O’Flannagain were alone in the center of the mess and she was slowly turning around.
“What, I kill a gunship for the man and I can’t even get a drink?” she slurred at him. “What kind of bullshit is this?”
“The type where you’re drunk beyond even bad stereotypes of starfighter pilots and the Irish alike,” Henry snapped. “Stand down, soldier.”
“What’s your game, Wong?” she replied. “Or is it wang? What’s the wang on the Wong go for?”
“Commander O’Flannagain!” he barked. “You have two choices: go to your quarters and dry out, or go to the brig and dry out.”
“Fuck that. Drink with me!”
She waved the bottle at him and he yanked it out of her hand. Absently, he noted that it wasn’t even good Irish whiskey. Guarneri had clearly stopped serving the Commander good alcohol a while back already.
Taking the bottle was apparently the worst idea he’d had since entering the mess. O’Flannagain stared blankly at her empty hand for a moment…and then took a swing at him.
Unfortunately for her, she was drunk enough to telegraph the swing a mile away and he was still hopped up on adrenaline. Wong sidestepped the punch and sucker-punched his confused officer in the gut.
O’Flannagain went down, spewing vomit all over the floor before she hit the ground and stopped moving.
Sighing, Henry knelt and checked her pulse and airway. She was fine. She’d just passed out.
“Shame the Commander can’t handle her liquor,” he said loudly. “Got drunk, fell over. No one saw anything else, understood?”
He looked around the room, checking that the rest of the officers were now very determinedly focused on their meals or drinks.
“Apologies for the mess, PO,” he told Guarneri. “Commander Turrigan, Commander Gaunt.”
The two FighterDiv Lieutenant Commanders rematerialized as quickly as they’d vanished. They were drunk, but they were sober enough to recognize when they were in trouble.
“Get Commander O’Flannagain over to the medbay,” he said flatly. “Now.”
“Yes, ser.”
Each pilot took one of their boss’s shoulders and staggered her out.
Shaking his head, he turned back to Guarneri.
“Commander O’Flannagain is banned from liquor for the duration of this cruise,” he told the Petty Officer. “Log it in the system.”
“Yes, ser. Thank you, ser.”
“You’re supposed to have backup for just this kind of mess,” Henry said quietly. None of the officers in the room were senior to O’Flannagain. With the pilots gone, the most senior officer in the room was an Engineering Lieutenant Commander.
“I’ll check the rotations and make damn sure it’s in place next time,” he continued.
For now, though, he needed to touch base with his ship’s doctor. If O’Flannagain had enough of a drinking problem to take a swing at the Captain, it was a medical problem…and one that should have been addressed before now.
Returning to his quarters, Henry dropped onto his bed with a sigh of mixed relief and exasperation. The not-quite-fight in the mess had sent his adrenaline surging again, which meant it would still be hours before he slept.
If O’Flannagain was going to turn into a problem, though, he’d rather it came up early. She’d get one chance to shape up, with help from the ship’s doctor if the problem was addiction or another actual health problem.
The problem might well turn out to be that she was just an ornery troublemaker, though, and in that, Colonel Henry Wong knew his job. Her service record was such that he’d beach her rather than court-martial her, though.
He’d been a starfighter pilot once, after all. They were a breed unto themselves—and as O’Flannagain had drunkenly noted, Raven’s starfighters had killed a gunship for him. It was more than he’d expected from an eight-ship short squadron.
Sighing again, he realized he wasn’t going to sleep and got back up. The main room of his quarters could do double duty as a social space or an office, depending on what he wanted it to be at any given time.
A gesture told the couches to retreat against the walls. He considered bringing his desk out for a moment, but then just brought up a massive hologram of the battlecruiser in the middle of the suddenly open space.
“Show me crew positions and system readiness reports,” he said aloud. He gave the system a time stamp starting right when they had detected the bandit ships. Another gesture brought up a miniature display of the battle, but his focus was on his own ship.
Icons now cluttered the three-dimensional display. Just over two and a half meters long, the hologram filled the room from end to end, but at a 120:1 scale, he could pick out individual crewmen and systems.
“Begin playback, ten times speed,” he ordered. The icons started moving. The ship only tracked crew who were on duty as a rule. Most spacers assumed that the Captain could pull tracking for any crew he chose, regardless of whether they were on duty.
They weren’t wrong—but it wasn’t easy, either. Raven’s computers would require proper authorization from a minimum of two senior officers, logged for the record, before it would tell the Captain where someone who wasn’t on duty was on the ship.
Readiness one, though, put two-thirds of the crew on duty. The battle-stations call shortly afterward put everyone on duty.
Plus, Henry didn’t care if his crew were fraternizing or building a still in the underbelly of Engineering or anything like that. Without even looking for it, he presumed there were at least two stills on the ship and could pick the four most likely locations for them.
He’d have to make sure the word was quietly put out that Commander O’Flannagain was cut off from that booze, too. The people running the stills understood that there was a tradition of genteel obliviousness on the part of the senior officers so long as no one was drunk on duty and the liquor bans that did get ordered got enforced.
It wasn’t like the UPSF ran dry ships. The moonshine from the stills was just cheaper than the beer and liquor available in the messes and less bound by regulation.
Years of practice meant that he was able to track the playback of his crew’s actions while making mental notes for future action. His crew had taken too long to get to readiness one and too long to get to battle stations.
Today, the battle had started at a long-enough range that it hadn’t mattered. It might not next time. It probably wouldn’t ever matter, he had to admit, but he wanted his crew ready for anything.
That meant getting the scramble time down to less than standard. He’d got Panther’s crew down to a minute from readiness one, and two minutes and twenty seconds on a full scramble from bunks to battle stations. It had taken six months on the front line to get to that point, though.
He’d settle for ninety seconds and three minutes. Panther had arrived in the Set Province with that standard, which was already three-quarters of the UPSF requirement.
A requirement that Raven’s crew had failed to meet in the face of the enemy. He doubted any of his chiefs or officers were going to let that stand, but he also needed to understand th
e reason.
Some of it was obvious as he watched the playback. A good third of his crew was clearly either utterly unused to their new ship or going into autopilot when the battle stations alarm went off—the autopilot for their last ship.
A lot of spacers went the wrong way for ten, twenty, even thirty seconds. Others had to pause and consider at intersections.
That he could drill out of them. He clearly needed to be running a more intensive set of drills than he had been—which made sense, really. The drills had been running at about twenty percent above the usual rate, but they were a scratch crew assembled from teams sent over from a dozen other vessels.
There was still over a week left of their trip, and he was going to have to drill his people until they dropped. There was no way he could risk having Raven look bad in front of the Gathering. The UPA’s intentions and plans for the future were not going to be popular in a group that was almost certainly expecting the Terrans to help carry future campaigns to contain the Kenmiri.
With a shake of his head, he gestured for his desk to emerge from the wall.
He couldn’t sleep and he had a handle on the problem. He’d want to go over everything he did now after he’d slept, to make sure he hadn’t made any tired mistakes, but there was no reason not to start drawing up plans now.
Chapter Eighteen
“A hundred and fifty–second scramble, ser?” Iyotake asked the next morning as the senior officers gathered for the meeting Henry had called. “That’s a hell of a target to hold our crew to.”
“I mean, we missed the Force standard and my chiefs are already chewing bulkhead and spitting nails,” Song added. “But that’s half the time the standard allows.”
“And it’s the standard over a third of the front-line battlecruisers were reaching at the end of the war,” Henry said calmly. “Do I expect us to meet it without the pressure of repeated active combat and the accompanying drill?” He smiled.
“No. That scramble time requires not merely drilled veterans but heavily drilled veterans who have faced the fire together time and time again,” he told his officers. “I’m not planning on holding our people to that target…but it’s the target we’re going to give them. I have every confidence that this crew can match everything Panther’s people did for me in the long run, but we need to hold them to that standard and let them know what standard we want them to meet.”
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