by David Weber
The fact that they hadn't shot Caslet, however, didn't mean that the powers that were intended to forgive and forget, and he'd been denied a new command. Instead, and despite an otherwise brilliant command record, he'd been shuffled off to staff duty... and sent to Barnett, which promised to be even more of a dead end, with emphasis on the "dead", than most backwater staff assignments.
On the other hand, it could represent a chance for him to "redeem" himself by how he performs here, Theisman thought. If he does his job and we actually manage to hold out long enough to please our lords and masters, maybe they'll "rehabilitate" him. Hell, maybe they'll even pull me out in time. Yeah. Sure they will, Tommy.
It was only then that he realized a face was missing. Dennis LePic, Barnett’s senior people's commissioner and Theisman’s personal watchdog, was a relatively decent sort, but he was also inquisitive and assertive and took his responsibilities seriously enough to be a general pain in the ass. He was smart enough to leave operational matters to the professionals upon whom he spied, but he insisted on being kept informed and routinely "shared" conferences between Theisman and his staffers. LePic's absence from the split screen was more than enough to raise Theisman's mental eyebrows, but he kept that, too, from showing. Any prudent officer assumed that any com channel, be it ever so secure, was bugged, and his voice displayed no surprise as he greeted his callers.
"Hello, Megan, Warner. What is it?"
"We've just received the latest ship movement report from the Admiralty, Citizen Admiral," Hathaway replied in exactly the same sort of calm tones. "We're looking at several more ships than we'd anticipated, and Warner and I thought we should bring you up to speed."
"That sounds reasonable," Theisman agreed, tipping his chair back once more, but Hathaway’s response, however reasonable it might seem, obviously wasn't the real reason she'd commed him. They were due for a routine staff meeting in less than two hours, and even word that the Admiralty was sending him the entire Capital Fleet could have waited that long. "So just what sort of good news are we looking at?" he asked.
"For starters, they're sending us the Sixty-Second and Eighty-First Battle Squadrons," Caslet replied, and despite himself, Theisman's eyebrows did rise this time. "The Sixty-Second is twenty-five percent understrength, and the Eighty-First is short one ship, but that's still thirteen more of the wall, Citizen Admiral."
Theisman nodded. That was a much heavier reinforcement than he'd let himself anticipate. In fact, it would increase his wall of battle's strength by almost thirty percent, which might actually indicate that the Republic's rulers intended to make a serious fight for Barnett. They wouldn't be able to hold it even if they did, but if they gave him enough combat power he could at least make his defense buy the rest of the Navy a chunk of time big enough that it might actually mean something. But despite his surprise, he delivered a moderately quelling frown to his ops officer. Caslet had commanded his own ship long enough to know to avoid slips like the one he'd just almost made. Or perhaps it was because he'd commanded his own ship for so long that he had trouble remembering that the only people the Navy was allowed to address as "Sir" or "Ma'am" these days were its people's commissioners.
PNS Vaubon had been a light cruiser, and as light cruisers were wont to do, she'd spent most of her time cruising independently. However much he might have ridden herd on the revolutionary vocabularies of his subordinates, Caslet himself had gone for enormous stretches of time in which he'd had no superior, aside from his own commissioner, to whom to report directly. But whatever the reasons, an officer in his present position simply could not afford anything remotely suggestive of lack of enthusiasm for the new regime.
"That's certainly a good start," Theisman said after a moment. "Is there more?"
"Yes, Citizen Admiral," Hathaway said. "That's the heavy metal, but it looks like we're getting another destroyer flotilla, the better part of the Hundred Twenty-First Light Cruiser Squadron, and another half-dozen heavy cruisers. We may even be getting another battlecruiser, assuming we get to hang onto her." Except to someone who knew her very, very well, Hathaway’s tone as she delivered her last sentence would have sounded completely normal, but Theisman did know her.
"We can always use more battlecruisers," he said easily. "Which one is she?"
"The Tepes, Citizen Admiral." Caslet's tone exactly matched Hathaway's, and Theisman felt his expression try to congeal as he realized the true reason Megan and Warner had commed without LePic, and probably only after making certain the commissioner had been diverted elsewhere by some very legitimate distraction.
The Tepes, he thought. One of the Warlord-class ships which had replaced the Sultans as the newest and most powerful battlecruisers in the Navy's inventory. But Tepes didn't belong to the Navy... and her crew consisted not of Navy personnel but of officers and enlisted personnel drawn from the Office of State Security.
Theisman hid a core-deep sense of disgust, and fear, as he considered the news. Like virtually all regular officers, even those who most ardently supported the new regime, he found the logic in diverting desperately needed warships from front-line task forces questionable, to say the least. But what he found frightening, and what he dared never voice aloud, was the other side of the logic. StateSec was amassing an entire fleet of warships which were either commanded by SS officers or even, as in Tepes' case, manned entirely by SS personnel.
Admittedly, much of StateSecs present manpower had come from discontented elements of the pre-coup People’s Navy and Marines, but even with the aid of those volunteers, Oscar Saint-Just's thugs lacked the training and experience to make full, proper use in combat of the ships they controlled. Yet those vessels constituted what was, in effect, a second navy, and one had to wonder why it had been created. No doubt part of it was simple, if stupid, bureaucratic empire-building. Like any other parasite, StateSec had an insatiable appetite for ever more power, even at the expense of diverting strength from the fleets which actually had to face the enemy. Yet there was more to the creation of the SS's private fleet than mere egotism or muscle-flexing. It would be all but useless against the Manties, but that wasn't the real point. As the real Navy knew perfectly well, the point was to provide StateSec with a "navy" which could be relied upon to execute the coercive domestic missions Saint-Just might not fully trust the regular fleet to carry out against the Republics own citizens. Or, Theisman thought grimly, to execute missions against Navy personnel, or their dependents, like that idiocy in Malagasy.
But what sent a chill down his spine, and explained LePic's absence, was that PNS Tepes had a very special reputation. Although her crew was drawn from the Office of State Security, she was permanently assigned to the Office of Public Information. She was, in fact, Committeewoman Cordelia Ransom's personal transport, and if the thought of diverting one of the Navy's most powerful battlecruisers to serve as a private yacht for the mistress of the Republics propaganda machine and her personal crew of technicians seemed obscene, no one would ever dare say so. Just as no one would ever dare point out that Ransoms decision to visit the Barnett System could be far more dangerous to the officer charged with defending that system than any Manty task force.
"Well," Theisman heard himself say in brisk, efficient tones, "whether we get to keep Tepes or not, we can certainly use the other units! In fact, Warner, I want you to rethink our current forward pickets. If we're going to be seeing more ships of the wall, then I'd like to look at releasing Citizen Rear Admiral Tourville's battlecruisers from patrol duty here in Barnett."
"Yes, Citizen Admiral. We can do that," Caslet replied, eyes lowered as he keyed notes to himself into his console. "The destroyer reinforcements alone will more than compensate for the loss in sensor platforms. What did you want to do with them instead, Citizen Admiral?"
"I'd like to send his second and third divisions up to thicken the picket at Corrigan. That won't be enough to hold it when the Manties finally move in, but at least it could help force them to be a little more ca
utious about the way they scout the system. Let's put in enough firepower to make them think twice about recon sweeps with light cruisers."
"Yes, Citizen Admiral. And the rest of the squadron?"
"I think I'd like to detail them for a little aggressive sweeping of our own." Theisman tipped back his chair, and his voice was suddenly more thoughtful as he got past the warning that Tepes was en route to Barnett and began truly considering the rest of the news. "You say half a dozen heavy cruisers are in the pipeline, Warner?"
"Yes, Citizen Admiral."
"All right. In that case, let's give Tourville CruRon Fifty and half a destroyer flotilla or so in return for the battlecruisers for Corrigan. That'll give him a nice little raiding force, with the speed to run away from anything it can't fight, unless, of course, it runs into a couple of divisions of Manty battlecruisers with their new compensators."
Theisman grimaced as he added the qualifier, and the more than half-defensive edge he couldn't quite keep out of his voice despite his best efforts irritated him immensely. At the same time, however, all four of the battlecruisers he intended to assign to the operation were Warlords, with the first fruits of the technology transfers from the Solarian League. The Manties' most recent Reliant-class still boasted a marginal advantage in weapons fit, and its electronic warfare capabilities offered it a substantial combat edge, but both those margins would be far smaller against a Warlord than anyone on the other side was likely to suspect. And, of course, if Tourville happened across something older than a Reliant, well...
"Yes, Citizen Admiral," Caslet said again. "Do you have a specific target in mind, or do you want Citizen Commander Ito and me to work up a list to choose from?"
"I think Adler or Madras," Theisman said. "They're still settling in at Adler, in particular, so a good hard jab there might at least draw them into diverting more force to their pickets there and away from Barnett. But let's not limit ourselves to what occurs off the top of my head. Go ahead and sit down with Ito, then give me what the two of you think are the best prospects." He paused a moment, rubbing an eyebrow, then nodded to himself. "And go ahead and think about possible multiple targets. I don't want to get carried away with my own aggressiveness here, but if we can scrape up the tonnage, hitting the bad guys in more than one place at a time could be a good idea. Even with these new reinforcements, we're unlikely to hold Barnett if they concentrate properly, so any chance to make them worry about their defenses is worth taking, I think."
"Yes, Citizen Admiral. We'll have something for you by this afternoon's brief."
"Good, Warner." Theisman smiled at his ops officer, then glanced back at Hathaway, and his voice was carefully normal again as he addressed her once more. "In the meantime, Megan, would you please see about locating Citizen Commissioner LePic and passing this information on to him, as well? This is a lot more firepower than I'd anticipated having available, and it could substantially change my contingency planning. Please tell him that I need to discuss the new possibilities it opens up and that I asked you to bring him up to speed on the new ship movement schedule before he and I put our heads together."
"Of course, Citizen Admiral," Hathaway replied as if she had no suspicion at all that Theisman was speaking for the recording devices all three of them were certain had been tapped into the entire conversation... or that everything before the chief of staffs first mention of the name "Tepes" had been so much window dressing.
"Thank you, Megan. And you, too, Warner," Theisman said very sincerely. "I appreciate it."
Chapter Five
Five days after returning to Grayson, Honor left its surface once more. Her hasty scramble to cope with her responsibilities in such a short period had run her steading staff ragged, and she felt more than a little guilty about that. Especially since all of her Harringtons, from Howard Clinkscales down, had anticipated that she would be on-planet for at least four weeks. Even that would have been on the tight side for her to give proper personal attention to all the problems, and solutions, which had cropped up during her long absence, and she was unhappily certain that she'd left far too much undone.
But she also knew how capable Clinkscales was. In many ways, he was actually better at running Harrington Steading than she was, and besides, when the Conclave of Steadholders had invested her with her steadholdership, it had specifically recognized her commitment to the Royal Manticoran Navy and accepted that her duty as a naval officer would frequently pull her away from Harrington. Or, to put it another way, she told herself with bleak self-scorn, I've got an outstanding exec and enough wiggle room to run away in the name of "duty" and dump the entire load on him.
She gave herself a mental shake and gazed out the view port, stroking Nimitz with slow, gentle fingers as the sky turned indigo blue and then black beyond the armorplast. The 'cat curled in her lap, his soft purr buzzing through his bones and into her own, yet she knew he was much less relaxed than he might appear to other eyes. She felt him in the back of her brain, sharing her emotions and keeping watch upon them... and failing to understand.
She closed her eyes and leaned further back, tasting the faint but persistent trace of Nimitz’s worry. There was no complaint or scolding in it, only a vague discomfort as, for the first time in his experience, he found himself unable to understand her emotions. There had been many times when he'd found human philosophical concepts odd or even downright perverse, just as there were certain forms of human enjoyment, like swimming, whose appeal were completely incomprehensible to him. But however hard he might have found it upon occasion to grasp why Honor felt something, never before had he been unable to understand what she felt.
This time he was. Which, she reflected, wasn't surprising, given how little idea she had of what was happening inside her. All she knew with certainty was that she had become increasingly and acutely uncomfortable in Hamish Alexander's presence.
It wasn't because of anything he'd done or said, and she could hardly blame the man for what he might feel in the privacy of his own mind. But even though his actions and behavior were precisely what they ought to have been, the flicker of admiration behind them refused to go out. It never turned into anything stronger than a flicker, he, at least, had himself under control, she thought bitterly, but it was always present, as if a part of him were automatically suppressing it without quite being able to eradicate it. Yet whether he knew it was there or not, she did, and that traitor part of herself which had sensed their inner resonance longed to reach out to what he kept so well concealed even from himself.
For the first time, her link to Nimitz was as much curse as blessing, for try as she might she simply could not pretend she was unaware of White Haven's banked inner glow, and her awareness jabbed at her, unsettling her efforts to maintain a matching self-control. Looking back now, she remembered the first few months after she'd realized how Nimitz was tying her perceptions into the emotions of those about her. She'd tried, at first, to get him not to do that, because it had seemed wrong somehow. Dishonest. As if she were some sort of emotional voyeur, spying on the most intimate aspects of people who didn't even realize they could be spied upon. But Nimitz had never grasped why she felt that way, and she'd gradually come to realize that it was because treecats never perceived anyone any other way. The emotions of others were always there for a 'cat; he couldn't not perceive them, and trying not to was like trying to give up breathing.
And so she'd lost her struggle to remain blind, and, in time, she'd even come to forget that she'd ever tried to remain so. She'd become as accustomed as Nimitz himself was to sensing others' emotions, come to rely on it for guidance. It no longer seemed like spying because, as for the 'cats, every human she encountered was a blaze of emotions, feelings, attitudes which cried out to her. She could screen them, pay less attention to them, but she couldn't make them go away. One of Old Earth's overcrowded cultures, she couldn't remember which, but it might have been the Japanese, had had a saying about nakedness. Nakedness, they had said, is often s
een but seldom looked at, and that was how she'd learned to handle the onslaught of other people's emotions. But not this time. This time whatever had struck that reverberation between her and White Haven had destroyed her ability to "see" his emotions without looking at them. Outwardly, she'd managed to be just as correct as he; inwardly, she felt as if she were walking an emotional tightrope, and her inability to find any rational reason to feel that way only made it even more maddening.
And so she was running away. She knew she was, and she knew it confused Nimitz. Perhaps the 'cat's inability to understand her feelings stemmed from the very clarity with which he and his kind perceived emotions. They always knew precisely what their humans felt, but not what those humans thought. From her own experience looking through Nimitz’s empathy, she knew emotions were bright, vivid things. They might be complex or confusing, but they were seldom ambiguous, for they were portraits painted in primary colors, and perhaps that was what made treecats such direct, uncomplicated sorts. After all, there was no point in one 'cat's trying to dissemble or hide his feelings from another of his own species. It was, she thought, as if in seeing so clearly and deeply into one another they beheld an enormous, textural richness humans could not... and as if that very richness washed out the subtler hues and indirect interpretations which were all most humans could rely upon. Perhaps, with no need to analyze what others felt, 'cats had never developed the capacity to do so, and so Nimitz lacked the ability to sort out feelings which she could not sort out herself.
