Commander

by Phil Geusz

  “About eight hours,” he replied. “When you come around, you’ll probably be in good enough shape to exercise command again.”

  Which meant I’d already been deemed temporarily unfit, I realized, leaving Josiah in charge for the moment. So there was no point in arguing. Besides, he was an able man indeed. He’d make no more of a hash of things than I just had, by getting myself shot up for no good reason. “I won’t argue anymore,” I promised the technician. “In fact, I’ll be a model patient.” Then I turned to Nestor. “When I come back around, I’ll want a complete situation report ready and waiting for me.”

  He nodded. “Understood, sir.”

  I smiled at him as the doctor finally sank his needle home. Then, with my last conscious effort I reached out with my good arm and clapped him on the shoulder. “And thank you, too. No one could ask for a better friend.”

  31

  It was in fact fourteen hours before I returned to the bridge. This was because there was nothing going on anyway, so the decision was made to allow me a little extra rest. Though Richard had traded a few ineffectual salvoes with an orbital battery—part of the price of running late—while escaping from Imperious’s immediate vicinity, once that little bit of excitement was behind us there was nothing to do but hold our course for the system’s Number Eight Point and wait to see what happened next.

  Everyone smiled and seemed pleased when Nestor wheeled me up onto the bridge-deck proper, and First Officer Parker (looking very odd back in his regular navy uniform) helped Nestor transfer me into my usual seat. The sick-bay types had promised to “patch me up”, and that was a pretty fair description of what they and their gadgets had accomplished. Nothing had been properly healed; rather scar tissue was rapid-grown in all the appropriate places so that I didn’t leak anymore, and transfusions and interesting chemicals had done the rest. While I could use one leg and one arm pretty well and hobble around a bit on crutches, physically I was still a wreck. But at least I was an alert wreck, which was all that really mattered under the circumstances. “We’re very glad to have you back, sir!” Josiah announced as he stood up straight and saluted after getting me settled in.

  “Thank you all for your concern,” I replied, nodding to everyone. “You’ve done a fine, fine job. Let’s walk this last mile, then we can take a nice long rest.” I turned to Wu. “We’re behind schedule, Astrogator.”

  “Yes, sir!” he agreed. “Sixteen minutes worth, though we were eighteen behind at our worst.”

  “I’ve been overdriving the engines, trying to make up some of the lost time,” Parker interrupted. “She should handle it just fine, so long as it doesn’t go on too long.”

  I nodded—no one knew precisely how far Richard could be pushed better than Parker. Some captains might resent this in a subordinate, but I was grateful as could be for his wealth of experience and willingness to apply it as needed. “Yes. Of course.”

  “As a result,” Wu continued, even though I already knew from reading the situation report, “we’re subject to interception from two forces. The light cruiser escort from the smaller convoy, and the crippled heavy and her destroyer. The other escort—the two destroyers—are totally out of the picture.”

  I nodded again. In other words, our situation was very bad indeed. “Options, anyone?”

  “If we just blunder on ahead, sir, we’ll have to fight them both,” Wu offered. “But they’ll only have about a quarter of an hour to destroy us before we translate out. Perhaps we can hold out that long?”

  With a tissue-paper hull? I didn’t reply. The light cruiser was the old Whiff of Grape, sister-ship to the Sword of the People which I’d grappled so long ago. As an old, nearly obsolete ship Sword had been poorly officered, manned and fought. We would never have taken her otherwise. And now the class was that many years more ancient and undesirable to serve aboard. Hardly the sort of ship to attract top-level personnel! Plus the entire series was known to be terribly prone to engineering failures due to overeager adoption of what back then had been bleeding-edge technology. This resulted in deep design flaws that were avoided in later cruisers, but proved impossible to remedy in the Swords. The story was in all the engineering training manuals, where it served as a cautionary tale. “How many hours ahead of those destroyers from the second convoy are we, Wu?”

  “Over twenty, sir. They haven’t even tried to come after us. So our lead is steadily growing.”

  I smiled. That gave us all the time in the world. “Work out a course to intercept the smaller convoy. Just as if we’d decided to take as many ships with us as possible on our way down to Davy Jones’s locker. Got it?”

  He blinked. “Aye-aye, sir!”

  “Cut our acceleration down to nominal flank, and aim us for the tail of the line. Like we’re trying to sneak by.”

  “We can’t, you know,” Josiah pointed out. “The geometry’s all wrong.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “As soon as she comes about, I’m going to aim for the head of the convoy. Then the tail, the head, the tail… It’s a miniscule correction, but I want to force them to make it over and over again.”

  “So that they’re constantly fiddling with the engines,” Uncle Robert observed.

  “Yep,” I agreed. “Let’s see how well their control rods hold up to the strain. I bet ours do a lot better! And who knows? If worse comes to worse, we’ll get to see how many merchies we can take down with us after all.”

  32

  After that I sat back in my comfortable chair and drank tea for a few hours. Sometimes a pharmacist’s mate appeared and gave me an injection or changed a dressing. I asked Nestor to circulate among the Imperious Rabbits whenever he got a chance, helping them settle in and deal with what must be a million problems. Two had already died under our care, but the good news was that we had enough Tanks to accept all the remaining critical cases. The blind bunny—whose name I’d learned was Clem—was in a Tank as well, and would surely be able to see again. On that front, at least, the news was as good as could be expected.

  I also spent as much time studying the damaged heavy cruiser as I could. The Seventh of November, named after the date of Imperial Secession, had lost her bows to a torpedo. All by itself this was a blow she’d been lucky to survive. In addition she’d also taken two medium or perhaps even heavy bolts to the stern half of the ship, both of which had burned through deep into her guts. Clearly, other Royal Navy men besides ourselves were earning their paychecks. The destroyer was of the conventional sort, equipped with a medium-light battery plus torpedoes and very, very fast, while the damaged ship was barely capable of crawling along. How much of that cruiser’s armament is still on-line? I asked myself over and over. The answer was terribly important, or would be if we proved able to deal with Whiff of Grape. It was Zombie all over again, except this time I was on the outside looking in. I couldn’t be certain of anything any more than my enemies had been back then. The only hint I had was the presence of the destroyer itself—if the cruiser were capable of defending itself, would it have been provided with a valuable escort that was in high demand for other assignments? In the end I just couldn’t know.

  Our engine room staff complained mightily at first about our continuous course changes, especially when they grew larger and larger in scope as we closed on our enemy. It was sheer misery for them; the rods were heating up, their readings were growing erratic as a result, and the system was generally growing less and less stable. I knew from personal experience what it must be like, and grew a bit irritable on the bridge out of pure sympathy. They took it in good spirits, however, once I explained what the game was and why I was abusing them so. Our engines were tame, simple beasts compared to the complex (not to mention defective) high-output system our enemy was burdened with—what sorts of flow-spikes and temperatures they might be experiencing, I didn’t even want to think about. On the other hand, the Imperials had decades of experience in dealing with the balky things; perhaps they might actually be well-prepared for this sort
of situation? I was no more certain about what was going on in their engine room than I was about how many workable guns November still possessed. All I could do was assume the worst, sip at my tea, and make them keep turning. In any sort of contest or conflict it’s always best to hold the initiative; to be able through one’s own actions to control what must come next. Richard had managed this trick through almost her entire cruise by virtue of being effectively invisible. Now, however, that advantage had been cast away. It was up to the Imperials now to step forward and execute, to perform their mission and blot us out of the sky. In the absence of the initiative, the next best thing a commander can do is to make it as difficult as possible for the enemy to accomplish his own goals. To make them execute under the most difficult conditions possible, in other words, and not give the enemy a single inch for free. It’s an inferior strategy—almost always a losing one, in fact. But making things difficult was all that Richard could do, so I was determined to keep straining Whiff of Grape’s powerplant right up until the bitter end. After all, sometimes the Imperials tripped over their own feet just like everyone else.

  In the end it came to blows. She hit us twice fair and square, the medium-caliber weapons rending great gaping holes in our unprotected hull. One of the rounds struck a hold we’d filled with tungsten from the mine we’d robbed. It was lucky for us that this was so; the metal ingots served as a very satisfactory armor-substitute and prevented further damage. The other, however, struck us directly on Mount Three and not only silenced that weapon, but overloaded the main trunks and shut down the rest as well. And just that quickly, we lost the ability to fire back.

  “Three hours, sir!” engineering reported. “That’s for One and Two. Three is toast, and the whole crew’s lost as well.”

  I slowly closed my eyes. I knew Three’s crew well—every single face. They invariably won all the intraship gunnery contests, and so even before taking command I’d often had reason to stop in and congratulate them during inspections and such. I’d made smalltalk with them as well on these occasions. And now they… They…

  I knew exactly what a gun crew looked like after a direct hit. All too well, I knew. And now all we had left online were the remaining pair of torps, which were short-range weapons indeed. “Come about, Mr. Wu,” I began, working out the angles in my mind. We’d close as best we could, then fire whatever we had left if we lived long enough. “To course—”

  But I never completed the order. Because instead Whiff of Grape stopped practically dead in her tracks. The vessel’s Field was still intact, rendering her inertialess. But her propulsion systems had finally failed under the stress of combat after so much previous abuse, leaving her to drift along the leftover vector she still carried from when her Field was last energized. Which amounted to practically nothing. And best of all, the expected next salvo never came. Nor the one after that. The continuity between her cores had broken down. It was the least destructive systemic catastrophe that could befall an engine room, but getting her underway again would take hours nonetheless.

  “Run for it!” I ordered instantly. “Make for Point Eight, now! Flank speed plus!”

  “You’re not going to finish her, sir?” Josiah asked.

  “Let her finish herself,” I replied. “That’s ship’s a deathtrap! Besides, we have bigger fish to fry and only so long to do it in.”

  33

  Brave words aside, the real reason I let Whiff of Grape live was that we had only two torpedoes left and no other functional weapons available. A sharp stick in the hand is always worth several dozen blasters back home in the closet. While engineering had promised me four of our six main guns back within a few hours, I’d turned far too many wrenches myself to bet everyone’s lives on the estimate. A thousand things could go wrong with the repair— further undetected damage might be found, for example, or perhaps we’d experience an unforeseen software glitch. Yes, the ship’s engineering staff always made their best estimate. But it was just that—an estimate. Only fools take estimates as gospel; it’s in the very nature of things that more can go wrong than right. Someday a self-appointed expert on naval strategy was certain to take me to task for letting the light cruiser go; I could almost picture the smug head-shaking as he typed up his disapproving article. But this way everyone aboard Richard had a much better chance to live to read it.

  The only thing I could see that we really had going for us was the “tightness” of the system. Yes, we were going to have to sail right past our remaining enemies, practically at point-blank range. But just beyond was Point Eight, which led not to more Imperial space but rather to New Geneva, the heavily-armed neutral trading-station that lay just between Imperious and Earth Secundus. The Genevans would not—could not!—tolerate enemy warships in her space. Indeed, the whole establishment was an artificial construct designed specifically to force the two eternally-warring parties to fight elsewhere. If we could but Jump through, the Genevans would forcibly intern us. Which also implied that they’d defend us, if they had to. The responsibilities and obligations of neutrals in time of war had been clearly defined for centuries, and for once the rules actually made sense in the real world.

  I kept us at full speed despite the fact that Whiff of Grape still showed no signs of life; while I expected her to be hors de combat for hours, who could know for sure that she might not surprise us? “That destroyer is certainly sticking close to home,” I observed eventually, referring to the cruiser’s single escort. It was the last fully-functional warship between us and safety.

  “Yes, sir,” First Officer Parker replied. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. Why isn’t she charging in, so that she can engage us for a longer period of time?”

  I scowled into my empty cup. My tactical choices were simple, but the enemy’s remained complex. Nothing they could ever do would give them their spanking-new battlecruiser back, or spare them the ignominy of having their capital world’s soil violated. It was too late for all that now. All they could hope for at this point was to kill us in revenge and parade the trophies, which was at most a miserable second-best. By any reasonable standard I’d already won my engagement a dozen times over—Richard’s loss would be as nothing to the harm we’d already done. The enemy therefore had little left to fear from us at this point. Yet, their actions seemed overly-cautious to me.

  Did they still have something else to lose, that I’d somehow overlooked?

  “Cruisers don’t grow on trees,” I observed. “Especially the heavy variety.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Parker agreed, nodding at the screen. “Look at how much effort they’ve put into salvaging that one! I’ve never seen such a patched-up Field—see all the superconducting tarps thrown over the shrapnel holes? And… I bet it took weeks to get her powerplant up and running again. Maybe even a couple-three months.”

  “At least,” Uncle Robert agreed.

  I wriggled my nose in concentration. Indeed, they were just barely staggering along with a Field of such inefficient geometry that I was surprised it functioned at all. Then another thought struck me. “Her bridge is slagged. I bet her captain was killed in action.”

  “Almost certainly,” my uncle agreed. “All the rest of her line-of-command officers, too. The butcher’s bill must be downright awful. Most likely they towed her into a portable dock to render her at least marginally spaceworthy, then sent her home with a maintenance-heavy scratch-crew.” His eyes widened. “In fact…”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, wishing for more tea. I didn’t know how the Imperial Navy did things, but in ours a ship as damaged as The Seventh of November would’ve been stripped of all its most highly-skilled ratings before being sent home for such extensive repairs. Experienced men were always in terrible demand at the front during wartime. Not the engineering staff—they’d be needed more than ever. But the signalmen, medical people, any surviving line officers, the marines and gunners… All would be welcomed with open arms into the rest of the ever-hungry fleet. There probably weren’t more t
han a handful of true fighting men left aboard, under the command of either a salvage specialist or, more likely, an otherwise unemployable nobleman with a long-since-demonstrated inability to cut the mustard where it really mattered.

  What I was looking at, in other words, wasn’t the menacing if badly damaged existential threat I’d been so worried about having to face, a ship that if in good health might’ve been of perhaps ten times Richard’s force. Rather, what now lay revealed before clearer eyes was just another target of considerable value, nearly as inert and helpless as the incomplete battlecruiser. And the reason the destroyer was displaying such a lack of aggressiveness was because her captain had known the truth all along, and was terrified we’d see through the false front!

  I toyed with the empty teacup a while longer. The last time I’d pushed the limits of sanity, I reminded myself, I’d gotten myself shot, a lot of civilian bunnies killed, and put Richard herself at risk due to falling behind schedule. And yet… This was war, and the day I quit pushing the limits was the day I’d serve His Majesty best by tendering my resignation. War is risk and risk is war. Anyone who ever lost sight of that equation was better off staying home by the nice warm fire. “Call Sergeant Petanovich to the bridge,” I ordered eventually. “I think I’ve got one last job for him.”