Storm from the Shadows-OOPSIE

by David Weber

  "Ma'am, I really appreciate the offer," Abigail said. "And under other circumstances, I'd probably be willing to kill to get it. But if I run off with a prize like this, it's going to be a blatant case of string-pulling!"

  "Of course it is!" Kaplan replied, and snorted at her expression. "Abigail, that's what happens with officers who demonstrate superior performance. Oh," she waved one hand in midair, "it happens for other reasons, too, and a lot of those other reasons suck, when you come right down to it. God knows we all know that! And I suppose there probably will be at least a few people who think you got this assignment because of who your father is. I rather doubt anyone who knows Steadholder Owens is going to think he pulled the string in question, but that's not going to keep some people from whining and bitching about the fact that you got it and they didn't. And most of those people who are going to be doing the whining and bitching aren't going to want to consider the possibility that you got it because you were better than they were, which is why—as far as they're concerned—it's obviously going to be a case of nepotism. Well, guess what? That happens, too. Or do you think there weren't plenty of officers who thought Duchess Harrington was being pushed up faster than she deserved, even after Basilisk Station, because of favoritism from people like Admiral Courvoissier and Earl White Haven?"

  "I'm not Duchess Harrington!" Abigail protested. "I don't have anywhere near her record!"

  "And she wasn't 'Duchess Harrington' at the time, either," Kaplan replied. "That's my point. She was given the opportunity to achieve what she achieved because of the ability she'd already demonstrated. I'm offering you this slot for the same reason. There's nothing wrong with pulling strings as long as the result is to put the right officer in the right billet at the right time, and if I didn't think that was what was happening here, I wouldn't have made the offer. You know that."

  She held Abigail's eye firmly until the younger woman finally pulled away from her gaze to glance appealingly at Terekhov.

  "I suppose that all sounds pretty embarrassing," the newly promoted commodore told her with a crooked smile. "As it happens, though, I concur with Commander Kaplan's assessment of you and your capabilities. I think she's right about the reasons you'd be a perfect fit for this particular slot, too. And, to be honest, Abigail, I think you need to consider very carefully whether your reasons you should turn it down are anywhere near as good as her reasons why you should take it. Not just from the personal perspective of your own career, either. I think this is where the Navy—all of the Alliance's navies—will get the maximum benefit from your experience and your talents."

  Abigail looked at him for several seconds, then looked back at Kaplan and managed a smile of her own.

  "Am I on as tight a time schedule for making up my mind as Helen is, Ma'am?"

  "Not quite." Kaplan smiled back, then twitched her head in Terekhov's direction. "I figured I might need the Skipper—I mean, the Commodore—to help twist your arm, so I asked him to play rabbi for this little discussion. Unlike Helen, you have, oh, eighteen hours before you have to decide, though."

  "Gee, thanks." Abigail looked back and forth between her and Terekhov for another moment, then shrugged. "Actually, I don't need that long," she said. "I've just discovered that I'm neither sufficiently selfless nor concerned enough about whether or not people think I'm using 'influence' to turn something like this down. If you're really serious about wanting me, Ma'am, you've got me! And . . . thank you."

  "Remember that sense of gratitude when I start working you till you drop." Kaplan's smile segued into a grin, and Abigail chuckled.

  "Which brings us back to you, Helen," Terekhov said, and Helen's eyes popped back to him. "As I say, you have a few hours to think it over."

  She stared at him, her mind racing as it dashed off down all the branching futures radiating from this moment.

  He was right. She had been anticipating a stint as a very junior assistant tactical officer squirreled away aboard a battlecruiser or a superdreadnought somewhere. An assignment which would punch her ticket for the next stage of her desired career track. And, she admitted to herself, an assignment which would be unspeakably boring after Hexapuma's deployment to Talbott. Then there were all the people she'd met in Talbott, the sense that she had a personal stake in making certain the Quadrant's integration into the Star Empire went smoothly, without still more bloodshed. Obviously, one lowly ensign—even if she was a commodore's flag lieutenant—was hardly going to be a maker and a shaker at that level of politics, but she found that she still wanted to be there.

  Yet if she took this assignment, it would divert her from the tactical track. She'd lose ground on the other ensigns and junior-grade lieutenants who were putting in that boring time, laboring away in the bowels of some capital ship's tactical department.

  Oh, get real! she scolded herself. You're planning on making the Navy your career! You'll have plenty of time to make up for any ground you lose here. And Master Tye always did tell you you needed to cultivate more patience, didn't he? So if you're going to find an excuse, find a better one than that!

  Which brought her face-to-face with the real reason she was hesitating. A reason named Paulo d'Arezzo. He was almost certainly going to draw the same sort of assignment she'd expected—right here in Home Fleet, more likely than not—and she'd suddenly discovered that she really, really didn't want to be clear across the Talbott Quadrant from him.

  Oh, that's even better than the last excuse, she thought sourly. Or it's less logical, at least. You know damned well they'd assign the two of you to two different ships, don't you? Which means you'd see almost as little of each other even if you were both assigned to Home Fleet as you'd see with him here and you off in Talbott again.

  It seemed to her that it took forever for those thoughts to flow through her mind, even though she knew better. But, finally, they trickled to an end, and she drew a deep breath and looked up Terekhov again.

  "It wasn't what I had in mind, Sir—obviously. But, like Abigail says, if you're serious about wanting me, you've got me."

  Chapter Thirty

  I wonder if this was really such a good idea, after all? Helen Zilwicki asked herself wryly as she stepped into the lift car and punched in the proper combination.

  She'd been half afraid the Commodore might reconsider his choice of flag lieutenants once he discovered how unsuited to the position an officer as junior as she was truly was. She probably shouldn't have, since she'd had ample opportunity to observe just how decisive he was, but so far he actually seemed not even to have experienced any serious qualms. Which was more than she could say.

  She grimaced at the thought, but there was at least some truth to it. Once upon a time, she'd thought the pressure a midshipwoman experienced on her snotty cruise was intense, and she supposed it was. She'd certainly felt more than sufficiently exhausted at the time, at any rate! But her present assignment had an intensity all its own.

  Oh, stop whining, she told herself sternly. "This, too, shall pass," as Master Tye was always so fond of telling you. You'll get your feet under yourself this time, too. After all, you've only been a flag lieutenant for four days!

  Which was true enough, even if it did seem scant comfort as she went scurrying about the passages of HMS Quentin Saint-James on Commodore Terekhov's missions.

  When she thought about it, she rather suspected that the Commodore was running her harder than he actually had to. For example, there was her present mission. There was absolutely no reason she could think of why the Commodore couldn't have simply screened Commander Horace Lynch, Quentin Saint-James' tactical officer, for this particular message. In fact, it probably would have been more efficient. But, no; he'd decided Ensign Zilwicki should trot right on over to the TO's office and deliver it in person. Helen didn't mind the exercise, and the actual message was pretty interesting, but the fact remained that there had been other—and arguably much more efficient—ways for the Commodore to deliver it.

  But this one keep
s me busy, she thought, watching the lift car's position indicator flicker across the display panel. And he's been doing a lot of that ever since we found out about that assassination attempt on Torch. Despite herself, she shivered at the thought of how close her sister had come to death. And she knew Berry entirely too well. She knew exactly how she must have taken the deaths of so many other people, especially as a consequence of an effort to murder her. And she could also understand why there'd been no message from her father about it. There probably was one chasing its way off towards Spindle, where he could expect it to be relayed to Hexapuma, but she had no doubt that he—and probably that scary son-of-a-bitch Cachat, too, now that I think about it—were off . . . looking into who had truly been responsible for it.

  Unlike most subjects of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, Helen was less than convinced that Haven had orchestrated the attack on Torch. Of course, she had the unfair advantage of her sister's and her father's letters, which was why she knew Victor Cachat, that otherwise apparently unfeeling juggernaut of a Havenite secret agent, was madly in love with one Thandi Palane, who happened to be Berry's"unofficial big sister," as well as the commander-in-chief of the Torch armed forces. Not only would Cachat have refused to have anything to do with an assassination attempt which might so readily have caught Palane in its path, but he had to know how she would have reacted to his complicity in any attempt to kill Berry or Princess Ruth, either. And if he hadn't had anything to do with it, then it was for damned sure no other Havenite agent had. Not the way Cachat, the Audobon Ballroom—and my own dear Daddy, of course—were wired into the intelligence community.

  Unfortunately, Helen Zilwicki was only one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's newest ensigns. The fact that she was convinced someone else had pulled the trigger wasn't going to cut very much ice with the powers that were. For that matter, she felt quite confident that one Anton Zilwicki had already reached as high up the intelligence food chain as he could in an effort to convince Manticore of that glaringly self-evident (in her own modest opinion) fact. If he hadn't been able to get anyone to listen to him, then no one was going to be listening to her anytime soon.

  And fair's fair, she admitted grudgingly. We Zilwickis have had just a bit more experience than most people with the sordid world of espionage and dirty tricks in general. And too much of that experience has been with the ladies and gentlemen of Manpower. I suppose we're as naturally predisposed to look for the Mesa connection as other people are to look for the Haven connection. But I do wish some of those people thinking "Haven done it!" would stop and think about the weapon they used. Sure, the People's Republic carried out plenty of assassinations, but so far as anyone on our side knows, they never used a sophisticated neurotoxin like that. They thought in terms of bombs and pulser darts and missiles. But Manpower, now . . . they think in bioscience terms.

  But there wasn't very much she could do about it, especially considering the fact that Quentin Saint-James (which had already come to be known as Jimmy Boy by her crew, despite the fact that she was less than three T-months old) was headed in exactly the wrong direction. And, since that was the case, she did her best to put it out of her mind once more and, as the lift car stopped and the doors slid open, turned her attention to the other reason she suspected Commodore Terekhov was keeping her so enthusiastically on the run.

  She hadn't really thought about it when the commodore offered her the flag lieutenant's slot, but there were several very good reasons—two of which had presented themselves strongly to her over the last few days—why that particular position was never offered to someone who wasn't at least a lieutenant.

  First, the reason a flag officer needed a personal aide to help keep him, his schedule, and his workload organized was fairly glaringly apparent. And, generally speaking, it took someone with rather more experience than any ensign could have accrued to do all that organizing. Helen had never actually realized—not in any emotional way, at least—just how much time a flag lieutenant spent making certain her flag officer's time was spent as efficiently and productively as possible.

  When she'd discovered just how thoroughly she was supposed to be tapped into all of the squadron's departments, even her naturally hardy soul had quailed. The responsibility for learning what went on in the administration and coordination of all those various departments—plus operations and logistics—and their respective duties had come as something of a shock to Helen. And the fact that they still didn't have an operations officer, a staff astrogator, a staff communications officer, or a staff intelligence officer didn't help any, either. At the moment, Commander Lynch was holding down the operations department for Commodore Terekhov, and Lieutenant Commander Barnabé Johansen and Lieutenant Commander Iona Török, Quentin Saint-James' astrogator and com officer, respectively, were filling in as his astrogator and communications officers, but the whole arrangement had an undeniably temporary, makeshift feeling do it.

  Helen suspected that everyone felt as off-balance in that regard as she did herself, but at least all of them were the heads of their own departments aboard the squadron flagship. That meant they had a far better understanding of what they were supposed to be doing than she did. Despite the fact that a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise was given experience working in every ship's department, Helen's perspective during her time aboard Hexapuma had always been that of a relative peon. Now she had to understand not simply what each department did, but how it did it in relationship to every other department, which was another kettle of fish entirely. Besides, even Lieutenant Ramón Morozov, Terekhov's logistics officer, was monumentally senior to her. Dealing with all of those other department heads on a "The-Commodore-says-you-have-to-do-this-right-now!" basis could be . . . daunting, to say the least.

  Even worse was the fear that she might drop some critical ball simply because of her own lack of experience. She knew she could count on Commodore Terekhov to keep an eye on her, but she'd also learned—the hard way, which, she often thought, was the way she tended to learn most things—that failure taught more than success. The Commodore, unfortunately, was also aware of that minor fact, and she had no doubt at all that he was prepared to allow her to fail as part of the learning process. Which was probably all well and good from his perspective, but tended to suck vacuum from hers. Helen Zilwicki was unaccustomed to failing. She didn't like it when it happened, she didn't handle it well, and, she admitted to herself as she trotted down the ship's passage towards Lynch's office, she absolutely hated the thought of letting someone else down through her own ineptitude.

  But that brought her to the other reason her present assignment was usually reserved for a full lieutenant. A flag lieutenant didn't exist simply because a flag officer needed an aide. She existed because an assignment as a flag lieutenant was a teaching experience, too. Well, in fairness, every naval assignment was a teaching experience—or it damned well ought to be, at any rate. But Manticoran flag lieutenants were far more than just aides and what were still called go-fors, and RMN flag lieutenacies were normally reserved for officers being carefully groomed for bigger and better things. The experience of managing a flag officer's schedule and sitting in on staff discussions and decision making processes other lieutenants never got to see was supposed to give a flag lieutenant a deeper insight into a flag officer's responsibilities. It was supposed to teach someone whose superiors felt she had already demonstrated the potential for eventual flag rank herself how the job was supposed to be done . . . and also how it wasn't supposed to be done.

  So far, none of the senior officers she'd found herself working with seemed to resent the fact that she was a mere ensign. She didn't know how long that was going to last, though, and she had a sinking sensation that more than one lieutenant she ran into was going to resent it. Not to mention the fact that she could absolutely guarantee that at some point in her future career some officer to whom she'd just reported was going to have looked in her personnel jacket, examined her Form 210, noted her present assignment, a
nd concluded she was receiving preferential treatment from Commodore Terekhov.

  Which, after all, is only the truth, she admitted. It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed her mind, and she tried to banish it with the memory of Commander Kaplan's comments to Abigail. Which, of course, only made her wonder if she was reading too much into them in her own case . . . and if she was headed for what her father had always called a terminal case of infinitely expanding ego.

  She reached her destination and pressed the admittance chime.

  "Yes?" a velvety tenor inquired over the speaker above the button.

  "Ensign Zilwicki, Commander," she said crisply. "Commodore Terekhov sent me."

  The door opened, and she stepped through it.

  Lynch's office was considerably larger than Helen's modest cubbyhole. In fact, it was larger than many an executive officer might have boasted aboard an older, more manpower-intensive ship. With a crew as small as a Saganami-C carried, there was room to give personnel a bit more cubage.

  The commander was seated at his workstation in his uniform blouse, and the desktop around his terminal was mostly covered in neat stacks of data chips and sheafs of hardcopy. He was a man of moderate height, with sandy hair and deep set brown eyes, and he had a magnificent singing voice. He also appeared to be quite good at his job.

  "And what can I do for the Commodore this morning, Ms. Zilwicki?" he asked.

  "He asked me to bring you this, Sir," she said, placing a chip folio on the corner of his desk. "It's some thoughts he's been having about the new laser head modifications."

  "I see." Lynch drew the folio closer to him, but he wasn't looking at it. Instead, he had cocked his head and those sharp brown eyes were studying Helen. "And would it happen that he discussed some of those thoughts with you before he sent you to see me?"