The Buchanan Campaign

by Rick Shelley

  “Uh, thanks, Commander. How long do I have before pickup?”

  “Nine minutes. Medevac will be coming in from the northwest.”

  “Roger, Commander. See you later.”

  Josef took a deep breath and looked out at the sand. He spotted the edge of the parachute that was dragging him.

  “I guess I should get out and cut that loose,” he said softly. “No need to slide halfway across the flipping desert.”

  He had to crank the canopy open by hand, and the crank was underneath him, down by his legs. Slowly, he pulled himself out of the capsule, getting a mouthful of sand when the canopy opened. He took off his gloves and dropped them back inside, then took the knife from the sheath on his right leg. In the deep, loose sand, the capsule slid as rapidly as Josef could walk. He sawed at the parachute cables, holding on to them, letting them drag him along. Finally, the last cable parted and the parachutes blew away. Josef fell against the pod. Even through his pressure suit, he could feel the residual heat in the composite skin of what was left of his Spacehawk.

  Josef checked his compass, then looked northwest. The medevac plane was already visible, a dark shadow low in the sky. It landed fifty yards from the pod. Josef fetched his helmet from inside the capsule, then walked toward the plane. A hatch opened and two crew members came down the short ramp.

  “About time you got here,” Josef shouted across the sand. “I could have got terminal sunburn.”

  “Didn’t anyone tell you that those birds aren’t disposables?” one of the medtechs asked. “They cost a trifle more than your undies, you know.”

  “Really?” Josef feigned surprise as he climbed the ramp. He had to duck his head to get through the open hatch. Josef had come within a quarterinch of being turned down for fighters because of his height. He barely fit in the cockpit of a Spacehawk. “They chafe just the same.”

  “Have the flight surgeon prescribe a cream,” the tech said. “Might help your disposition as well.”

  “Let’s strip you out of that suit,” her companion said as they entered the shuttle’s triage chamber. “Make sure you don’t have chafing serious enough to require a trauma tube.”

  Before the medevac flight landed at the naval port facilities in Westminster, Josef had been pronounced fit. He wound up sitting in the passenger cabin, sipping a glass of juice. He had tried a little innocent flirting with the female medtech, but she had proven unresponsive.

  “You’ve got more important things to worry about, Lieutenant,” she told him in a bantering tone.

  “Such as?” he asked.

  “Such as explaining how you managed to scrap a seventyfivemillionpound Spacehawk.”

  That did give Josef something to think about. / can’t help it that the hydraulics went south, he thought, trying to reassure himself. But would command feel the same way?

  “What’s the routine here, love?” Josef asked the female tech as the plane taxied to a halt at its hangar.

  “There’ll be a car for you, I imagine. Since you don’t need an ambulance, that is.” She flashed teeth.

  “Yet,” she added.

  “Ouch.” Josef laughed and grinned.

  There was a car waiting, though, with a naval rating to drive it. “Flight Lieutenant Langenkamp?” the driver asked when Josef came off of the plane.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m to conduct you to base operations, sir.”

  The driver proved to be totally uncommunicative throughout the fiveminute drive. When he finally parked, the driver turned to Josef and pointed at the building.

  “Through the door, sir. They’ll guide you from there.”

  In less than two minutes, Josef found himself in the office of an assistant base operations officer, Commander Owen Neely.

  “No injuries, Lieutenant?” Neely asked after returning Josefs salute.

  “No, sir. Thank you.”

  “Relax, lad. Have a seat,” Neely said finally. He gestured to a padded chair by the room’s single window. “Even without injuries you must be feeling tatty. I understand you went in rather hot.”

  “Yes, sir. Not all the training in the galaxy prepares you for something like that, sir.” Josef went to the chair. Neely perched on the corner of his desk.

  “Actually, the Navy rather prefers to avoid the situation. We’d rather train pilots to not have to leave their fighters so abruptly.” Josef tensed a little, but the commander waved a hand casually.

  “Sorry, that wasn’t meant as a criticism. It’s not as if your bicycle had a puncture now, is it? You can’t just pull over to the verge and wait for a maintenance lorry.”

  “No, sir,” Josef said, still too nervous to feel relieved.

  “Our report said you reported complete hydraulic failure.”

  “That’s what the telltales said, Commander. There wasn’t time to do more than accept that.”

  “Of course not.” Neely stood. “I think that’s all I need from you. There’ll be a board of inquiry, but that’s nothing for you to worry about. A formality. The admiralty likes its measure of red tape.” He smiled, briefly. “And just to impress you with our efficiency, I guess I could tell you that the replacement Spacehawk is already being ferried up to Sheffield.’

  “Oh?” Josef stood when the Commander did. “I was hoping to fly it up myself, sir.”

  “Ah, but you’re a downed flyer. King’s Regs require a pilot to stand down for seventytwo hours after, and I’m afraid we couldn’t wait that long to replace your fighter.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing, Lieutenant.” Neely hesitated, then said, “‘That ‘nothing’ is quite official. Let’s just say I spoke out of turn. You’re not to carry that out of this office.”

  “Whatever you say, sir,” Josef said, more puzzled yet.

  “Under the Official Secrets Act, Langenkamp.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  3

  Commander Ian Shrikes was a light sleeper. Even as a child, the slightest noise woke him. Each time he transferred to a new ship, there was a difficult period of adjustment. And each time he returned to Buckingham and his family, his system had to relearn the noises and movements common there. But he could always get by with the softest of alarms, and often woke before it went off. This morning, his hand was already reaching for the alarm when it started to buzz. Dawn in Westminster was two hours away, but duty called, even though Ian was in a staff position now, aide to Admiral Stasys Truscott. Today the admiral was moving his flag up to HMS Sheffield.

  “Already?” Antonia Shrikes asked sleepily as her husband got up.

  “Already. Sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Silly. You know you can’t get out of here without waking me.” She yawned and stretched, then sat up.

  “There’s no reason for you to get up yet, Toni. It’s just fourthirty.”

  “So I’ll nap after the kids leave for school,” she said. “I’ll fix breakfast while you’re showering.”

  Ian was wide awake. He was always fully alert as soon as he woke. He moved through his morning routine with economical efficiency, and fifteen minutes after getting out of bed, he was leaving the bedroom, ready for duty.

  Duty was an important word to Ian. He had spent twentyfour years in the Combined Space Forces, doing his duty to King and Commonwealth. His appointment to the Royal Naval Academy had been won in open competition. Each slow promotion had been won the same way, through ability and dedication.

  Ian approached his current staff duties with all the diligence he had brought to every other posting. It was a necessary step forward in his career. At the conclusions of his tour with Admiral Truscott, Ian knew he could anticipate promotion to captain and command of his own starship.

  Before he went downstairs, Ian looked in on the son and daughter he had seen too little of over the years. Ian Junior was thirteen. His room was decorated with models of starships, one of every vessel his father had served on. He was already working on a model of Sheffield. Ruby was nine
, an old nine. Her dolls had already been relegated to one corner of her room and received only occasional attention. Ruby spent most of her free time on the complink, showing an aptitude that amazed her parents.

  Looking in on the children almost disrupted Ian’s schedule. It was the only thing that could. But, finally, he broke away and went downstairs. Antonia was just putting his breakfast on the table.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” he asked when she sat across from him with only a cup of tea.

  She shook her head. “Not if I’m going back to bed.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you ever eat,” Ian joked. “Are you afraid you couldn’t fit back in the cockpit of a fighter?”

  “They don’t let old ladies into those cockpits. I got out while the getting was good. There were too many former fighter pilots and not enough upper division postings.”

  They put off any farewells until the car from fleet headquarters arrived. Then they held themselves to quick goodbyes and a brief hug and kiss. Restraint, holding back on any overly demonstrative displays—it was a routine they had perfected over fifteen years of marriage. That this was the first time Ian might be leaving for a major military engagement made no visible difference.

  But each of them felt it.

  There was little traffic on the roads so early, even in the housing development that was home to so many Marine and Navy families. In the last few months, the reality of the war had started to make itself felt in the CSF community. Men and women had failed to come home from cruises, their fate not yet explained. You could feel the difference in the still morning air. The staff car moved at the speed limit through the suburbs to the naval base on the east side of the Westminster Spaceport.

  At the gate to fleet headquarters, they stopped for an ID check. While he waited for the guard to verify his identity, Ian looked off toward the maintenance hangars, a mile away. There were lights banked on around the command shuttle that would take the admiral and his staff up to Sheffield. The guard came back out of the gatehouse, returned the ID chips, and saluted. Ian returned the salute with casual correctness, and his driver put the car back into gear.

  “Fleet ops building, sir?” the driver asked.

  “Yes, that’s right.” Ian had originally expected to go to the admiral’s house and accompany his chief in, but Truscott had specifically indicated otherwise.

  “I’m not certain just when I’ll be heading in, Ian,” Truscott had told him the evening before. “I’d rather have you at the office, making sure everything’s ready for us.”

  There were armed guards at the entrance to the Fleet Operations building—Marines in full battledress, not the usual Shore Patrol in dress uniforms. They also checked Ian’s ID before they saluted and allowed him to enter the building.

  You’d think there was a war on, Ian thought without humor. After nearly two years, fleet headquarters seemed to have finally decided that the Federation’s declaration of war might be serious.

  Ian took a lift tube to the sixth floor. Admiral Truscott’s temporary offices there would be vacated sometime within the next several hours. None of the staff clerks were in yet. Only one communications technician was in the outer office.

  “What do we have for the admiral this morning, Gabby?” Ian asked.

  “A bit of the usual, sir,” Louis Bierce said. “Nothing that looks particularly urgent. But that’s just my guess, isn’t it?”

  “Do you even remember the last time you were wrong about something like that?” Ian laughed. Gabby always seemed to know how important a piece was likely to be.

  “I’ve got it writ down in a diary somewhere,” Gabby said.

  “Too bad you’re not going out with us, Gabby. I don’t know how we’ll do without you.”

  “I’m just as happy to be staying, and I don’t mind saying so, sir. I’ve already put thirtyfive years in uniform. The Navy’s well off putting me out to pasture.” In his younger days, Gabby had been a prizefighter, winning the fleet heavyweight championship three times. Even though trauma tubes had always removed the most obvious signs of damage, there were still the physical clues, the thickening of the ears, the way he carried his head just slightly forward, the way he moved on his feet.

  “There’s no such thing as mandatory retirement because of age or years in service,” Ian reminded the chief petty officer.

  “But the pension doesn’t build past what they’ll give me now, sir. Anything beyond thirtyfive years is a gift from me.” Gabby chuckled.’ ‘I never was that much for charity.”

  “You must know where some important skeletons are buried, Gabby, getting your retirement approved with this war on.”

  “War ain’t become real enough yet, sir. That’s another reason to get out while the getting’s good.”

  “Okay, okay. Better give me the night signals, so I can have them ready for the admiral when he comes in.”

  Gabby’s fingers danced on the keys of his compsole. “Downloaded to your desk, sir.”

  Ian went through to his office, the smallest of the six offices in the admiral’s suite. He opened the curtains on his windows. The curtains had been ordered by the admiral. “We get enough of bare walls aboard ship,” he had told Ian when they moved into the offices. “Let’s make this place look a little more pleasant, what?”

  Ian ran a hand over the fabric of the curtains now, smiling warmly at the memories that came back, not just of this office—they had only been here a few odd months—but of a long career. The trickle became a flood. Ian moved around the office in something of a fog. The tea cart—it offered much more than just tea, but naval tradition insisted on the ancient name—had been switched on before Ian arrived. He usually drank coffee, but this morning, he dialed up tea and sat at his desk to work through the night dispatches.

  The memories kept building. Ian stared at his complink screen. Instead of reading the message printed there, he thought about the day he had reported aboard his first ship, the frigate HMS Avenger. The first officer’s orientation talk played back. Our frigates are the spiritual and lineal descendants of the frigates that sailed the seas of Earth as much as fourteen hundred years ago. There is a Golden Hind in the fleet. The original was Sir Francis Drake’s ship when Queen Elizabeth I ruled England.

  Avenger had seemed impossibly cramped to Ensign Shrikes, fresh out of the Academy. But when he took his first shore leave three months later, he had felt nervous with all the excess room of an atmosphere around him. He had spent most of his two weeks ashore inside one building or another, going outside only when he absolutely had to, and he had kept his eyes down then.

  That memory brought a chuckle, and the laugh brought Ian’s mind back to the present. He blinked several times, looked at the clock, then took a long drink of his tea. It was getting cool, so he got up to get a hot refill. Then he turned his attention to his work.

  It was just after 0630 when Gabby stuck his head into Ian’s office. “The admiral is in the building, sir, in the lift coming up.”

  “Thanks, Gabby.” Ian stood. “I have absolutely no idea what the schedule is for today. The admiral said we’d have to wing it.”

  Stasys Truscott came sweeping into the office with a booming “Good morning, lads.” He wasn’t the sort of man who would appear overly impressive out of uniform. Only a little above the average height for Buckingham, and considerably below the average weight, Truscott might have appeared to be a midlevel civil servant in mufti. But his uniform transformed him. Nearly eighty years old, Truscott had worn the uniform of His Majesty’s Royal Navy for sixty of those years, and he had frequently told Ian that he planned to stay in the RN however long it took him to make first lord of the Admiralty. “And Long John Raleigh didn’t get his appointment until he was a hundred and seven,” Truscott would always add. Sir John Raleigh was the current first lord.

  “Ian, we’re due at Long John’s office at 0730. We’ll have to leave here no later than 0710,” Truscott said as soon as he had blustered through his morning gree
tings. Social pleasantries remained a foreign language to him, but he always made the attempt to get through them in something approaching proper fashion.

  “Aye, sir, I’ll call for a car straightaway,” Ian said.

  “No need. My car is waiting.” Truscott started toward the door to his private office. “Gabby, would you come in with me?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Oh, Ian, before I forget,” Truscott said. “Ring up Captain Hardesty and tell him we’ll be coming up immediately after the briefing. We’ll go to the shuttle from the Admiralty.”

  “Aye, sir.” Mort Hardesty was captain of Sheffield. “Any idea how long the briefing will last, sir?”

  Truscott had already resumed his course toward his office. He just shook his head in answer.

  Gabby was only in the admiral’s office three minutes. Ian had just completed his conversation with Sheffield when Gabby came in, a dispirited look on his face.

  “What’s wrong, Gabby?”

  “My retirement’s off,” Gabby said, his voice crustier than ever. “I’m going up to Sheffield with you.”

  “The admiral couldn’t help?”

  “No, sir. He said the new orders are quite precise.”

  “I’m sorry, Gabby. Anything I can do to help?”

  ‘ ‘The admiral said I should ask you to get a staff car to take me home to pack. I’m to go straight to the shuttle from there.”

  “Sure, Gabby.” Ian made the call immediately. “Be waiting for you in five minutes. You called your wife yet?”

  “No, sir. I’m a bit scared of that.” Gabby managed a wan smile. “I’d best do it now though, before I just show up home.”

  Ian brought up the matter during the ride to the Admiralty, “Gabby had his heart set on retiring, Admiral.

  Isn’t there anything you can do?” Truscott sighed and shook his head. ‘ ‘I tried, but no go.

  I went straight to the top, but this order originated at the

  Palace. All retirements and discharges are off, indefinitely.

  All I could do was give Gabby a choice. He could stay here or move up to Sheffield with us.”