Chain of Command

by Frank Chadwick

  “Easy for you to say, sitting on the command ship,” Rivera answered. Sam looked over at her holoimage. She gripped the arms of her acceleration rig hard enough to make her knuckles white, and her eyes had narrowed to slits. Sam didn’t like the situation much either, but he didn’t see how insulting the task force N-2 was going to improve things.

  “Not altogether easy,” Atwater-Jones replied carefully. “Of course the real trick is to make difficult jobs look easy. You might work on that, Captain Rivera.”

  And then she cut her transmission.

  “Nice one, boss,” Sam said to Rivera. She looked at him for a moment, eyes cold, and then cut her own feed. Sam looked over at Captain Wu on Petersburg, who gave an elaborate shrug and then cut his transmission.

  Well, the situation may be hopeless, but at least we’ll die among friends.

  Sam kept his faceplate down so his next conversation would be private. He squinted up the commlink code for Marina Filipenko. She should hear the news of this attack on her home directly from him.

  Vice-Captain Takaar Nuvaash, Speaker for the Enemy, made way as a damage abatement party glided past in the weightless operations core of KBk Five One Seven, then continued to grip the handhold as two other crewmen passed, guiding three long bundles—bodies of crewmen wrapped in white death shrouds. The composite liner of one must have been torn because Nuvaash saw a red stain spreading along the side of the bundle. He closed his eyes and tried to master his growing anger and confusion.

  A hand touched his arm. His eyes jerked open and he saw Senior Lieutenant e-Toveri, one of the few officers on the cruiser whose company he enjoyed.

  “I am sorry, my friend, if I startled you,” e-Toveri said. He tethered himself to a wall stanchion, then dug a short length of crushed Taba root from a plastic pouch and slipped it into his mouth between this gum and lip. He shook his head and nodded toward the two crewmen and their somber cargo.

  “A difficult business this is turning out to be. Two more dead forward who we could not get to without hard suits and cutting torches, these three here, and I hear three more in engineering. Koomik’koh is one of them.”

  Nuvaash felt the news course through him like a wave of electricity, searing the nerves it surged through.

  “Koomik’koh. I knew him,” Nuvaash said, the traditional acknowledgement of the passing of a friend—the only other officer on the cruiser Nuvaash could honestly say that of.

  “As did I,” e-Toveri responded. “He inspired me to rise above the commonplace. He drove me to become better than I am.”

  “He made me laugh,” Nuvaash answered honestly. Koomik’koh was the only officer on the cruiser who had.

  e-Toveri touched his arm again and then pushed off to glide down the corridor, and soon Nuvaash was alone.

  None of this made any sense!

  Why would the home government support a war of aggression against the Humans when that war would bring glory to the Navy, the main agents of the failed military coup a year ago? Why? There must be a hidden reason.

  Then he remembered—a report had arrived shortly after the battle describing the course of ground combat on K’tok. Something about it had struck him as odd, but his attention was absorbed in helping stem the loss of atmosphere and directing damage-abatement parties, and in the chaos and urgency of saving the ship the message had slipped his mind. Now it was back with its annoying itch of vague wrongness. He rested the back of his head in one of the wireless datalink alcoves spaced along the corridor. Not all of them were still live, after the damage they had sustained, but this one was. He activated his surgically embedded commlink and contacted the ship’s e-synaptic memory core.

  Load ground status report received Day Seven, Tenmonth Waxing.

  Loaded

  Access visual.

  Nuvaash donned his viewer glasses and scanned the virtual image of the report which appeared in his optic centers. What had caught his attention? Then he saw it, at the bottom, the signature: Villi Murhaach, Governor Plenipotentiary of K’tok. That wasn’t the name of the governor he remembered.

  When had they arrived in-system? About two and a half months ago.

  Identity of Governor Plenipotentiary of K’tok, Day Seven, Sevenmonth Waning.

  Tinjeet e-Rauhaan

  Yes, his memory was not betraying him. When had that changed?

  Circumstances of replacement of e-Rauhaan by Murhaach as governor.

  Tinjeet e-Rauhaan killed in groundcar accident on Nine of Ninemonth Waxing. Replaced same day as governor plenipotentiary of K’tok, in accordance with statute, by deputy governor Villi Murhaach.

  Killed in a groundcar accident? e-Rauhaan must have been the unluckiest governor in history. Nuvaash could not remember the last time he had heard of an autocar malfunctioning dramatically enough to result in a fatality.

  Day Nine of Ninemonth waxing. Now why did that date stick in his mind? Oh, of course.

  List date KBk Five One Seven fired first multiple target ordnance in K’tok system.

  Ten of Ninemonth Waxing.

  Yes, they had fired the first shot of the war the day after e-Rauhaan had died and was replaced by Murhaach.

  Nuvaash accessed background files on both the former and current governor. Tinjeet e-Rauhaan, a politician widely known for his moderate views, had worked to reduce violence with Human colonists along the frontier zone. Not the sort of politician who would have approved of this war at all. News feeds described Murhaach, on the other hand, as a firebrand, an extreme anti-Humanist, who had been appointed to the largely ceremonial position of deputy governor only as a political concession to the opposition. But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he had become governor, and heir to the governor’s plenipotentiary power.

  Nuvaash broke the link to the ship’s memory core and floated in the corridor, thinking the puzzle through, arranging the pieces.

  Plenipotentiary powers: plenipotentiary meant the governor spoke with the full force of the home government and could act locally in its stead. Technically it meant the governor could launch the nation upon a war, but Nuvaash had never heard of that power being used—at least before now. The preemptive attack was not the sort of thing e-Rauhaan would ever have countenanced, while Murhaach would have embraced it immediately, used his extraordinary powers to authorize it, all of which was unprecedented and irregular, yet entirely legal. But . . .

  But Nuvaash had been briefed on the attack plan four days before e-Rauhaan’s death, and at that time KBk Five One Seven had already been on its firing course for two days. The plan must have been made even earlier.

  Why would anyone make a plan which relied upon the complicity of a planetary governor who would never agree to it—a plan which could be carried through only by virtue of the convenient, but presumably unforeseeable, death of that governor, and his replacement by the fanatical Murhaach?

  Nuvaash knew the answer to that question, and the answer froze him in place in the corridor, momentarily paralyzing his muscles and emptying his mind.

  Nothing had made sense since this operation began, but now Nuvaash saw clearly it was because of their habitual Varoki willing embrace of secrecy in every aspect of their lives. The shadow brotherhoods which formed a hidden layer of cross-cutting ambitions and allegiances below the surface of Varoki society, the complex jostling of wealth and ideology, privilege and pride in successive layers of political and corporate governance, had rendered the true motivations for public acts seemingly unknowable. The Varoki were used to things not appearing to make sense, used to the idea that the real reasons for actions were complex and concealed—so used to it that it no longer occurred to them that someone might simply be lying. Their suspicious nature did not protect them from deceit; on the contrary, it made them defenseless against it.

  We are dupes, Nuvaash thought, a race of dupes.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  26 December 2133

  (one hour later) (fifth day in K’tok orbit)

  The forty-eight hours fo
llowing the uBakai attack had been filled with frantic work, first trying to recover survivors from the two disabled destroyers, then making the surviving ships fully operational, and finally trying to find answers.

  The big questions were simple. What was wrong with their missiles? How had the uBakai reached out and killed six of their starships? How could they execute their mission with the forces and resources they had left? The smaller, softer question, the one hardly anyone asked out loud, was much more complicated: what were they doing here?

  Sam had no answers to any of those questions, even after the briefing from Atwater-Jones. If he would find them anywhere, he thought it would be in the boat and from the crew, not sitting in solitude in his cabin trying to think deep thoughts.

  Third Principle of Naval Leadership: Know your subordinates and look out for their welfare.

  He was about to set out on a tour through the boat, just to show his face and talk to some of the crew on duty, when his comlink vibrated.

  “Captain, here.”

  Sir? It’s Lieutenant Filipenko. I think we may have something you should see.

  “Something good, I hope. Where are you?”

  Port missile room, sir, and yes, it’s good.

  Ten minutes later Sam pulled himself through the hatch to the missile room and Lieutenant Filipenko held out her hand to him with two small, shiny metal pieces in it. Sam took them and examined them closely. They appeared to be a single lightweight metal part broken in half, and the broken area on each half was dramatically deformed, almost as if they had melted, but the break was sharp, jagged in places. Whatever had done this had done it violently. He looked up and saw Chief Joyce Menzies by her workbench, watching him with interest. The bench had a partially disassembled missile clamped to its work area.

  “Is this your work, Chief?”

  “All of us, sir,” she said and glanced at Filipenko. “Me and the lieutenant here, and two of my missile monkeys: Warwick and Guerrero. And Machinist First Hasbrow back in engineering, who set up the horizontal compression machine. Oh, and Ensign Robinette ran the stress numbers for us.”

  “Stress numbers, huh? Okay, what am I looking at here?”

  “Sir, that’s why our de crisse missiles are all broke-dick-no-workee.”

  Filipenko took over. “That is the angular brace for one of the rod aiming subassemblies out of that Block Four Fire Lance over on the workbench, sir. It’s why when our missiles detonated the laser beams went all over the place instead of at the target. We’ve got the diagrams up on a workstation over there.”

  Sam glanced over and even from two yards away could see a diagram cluttered with parts and notations.

  “Just tell me what it means.”

  “BuOrd changed the layout of the rod aiming assembly not long before we shipped out,” Filipenko said, “and they re-fitted all our missiles. There were problems in the tests and this was supposed to fix them.”

  “Let me guess: it didn’t.”

  “It might have, sir, but it made a different one. They moved the angle of these braces and apparently forgot they were only rated to take the stress of the acceleration in their original position, which was perpendicular to the acceleration vector when the missile was fired. They moved the brace about twenty-five degrees off-angle and so when it goes through the firing acceleration, it sheers in half. Then the rods just sort of rattle around up there when the laser pointer tries to align them.”

  Sam looked at the metal parts again, looked at the distortion around the break lines, how the metal had changed color..

  “You broke this under pressure in the machine shop? How much force does this part have to take, anyway?”

  “A little over twenty thousand gees, sir,” Menzies answered.

  “Twenty thousand? Are you serious?”

  Menzies shrugged. “Zero to twenty-one thousand kilometers an hour in less than a tenth of a second—the math’s pretty simple, sir.”

  The part seemed warmer somehow, just from Sam thinking about that sort of acceleration force.

  “Okay, what can you do about it?”

  Filipenko looked at Menzies and the chief answered. “We’re still looking over these assembly diagrams and the earlier test results. See, we can’t just back-build everything the way it was before, ‘cause the tests say they weren’t hitting right most of the time.”

  “Remachine the part to take the strain?” Sam asked.

  “Maybe we can manage that, sir. Engineering’s got a pretty good precision-tolerance fabricator. The problem might be weight and space. There are thirty of these de câlice de crisse things in each warhead. Heavier part might be a little bigger, and that could be tricky. A little more weight could mean it’s going to be slower coming out of the pipe, shave maybe a couple hundred klicks an hour off its launch velocity.” She shrugged again.

  “I don’t care. Give me missiles that kill, Menzies. If we have to get in closer to launch them, we’ll figure out a way to do it.”

  Sam handed the broken pieces back to Filipenko. “Filipenko, Menzies, well done. Let’s get the word out to the rest of the squadron so we can all work on a solution, but my money’s still on you guys coming up with the fix we’ll use. You go ahead and set up the tight beam and do the honors.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and it was the first time he could remember her saying that with enthusiasm and some pride.

  Now that was some good news, and Sam felt his mood lift a little as he headed back forward to officer’s country. One problem down and it wasn’t much past breakfast. Maybe he could line his other problems up and knock them over in just as orderly a fashion.

  Vice-Captain Takaar Nuvaash, Speaker for the Enemy, looked at the admiral floating behind the workstation, the admiral he knew to be complicit in the murder of a planetary governor and part of a conspiracy which had launched a war which had already cost hundreds of lives, perhaps thousands when the casualties from the ground combat and the attack at Bronstein’s World were added in.

  “Nuvaash, how badly did we damage the enemy?” Admiral e-Lapeela demanded.

  Nuvaash closed his eyes for a moment to suppress his warring emotions and order his thoughts.

  “Less than we anticipated, but we still materially reduced the capabilities of the enemy squadron. It also revealed a critical weakness: the missiles fired by the Human destroyers failed to hit, without exception, even though several of them evaded our point defense weapons and detonated.”

  It was a very good thing—Nuvaash thought but did not say—that they failed to accurately target the uBakai ships. The position of the distant picket destroyers guaranteed that two of them had excellent shots at the fleet as it overshot K’Tok’s north pole, and a low orbit destroyer had also managed to launch its missiles well before Nuvaash would have thought possible. The destroyers’ missiles had proven unexpectedly difficult to destroy.

  “That last destroyer we killed seriously damaged our ship and two others,” the admiral said. “Their missiles did not do that. Their point defense lasers did. Why did we not know they had this lethal close-in offensive capability?”

  He seemed more distant than he had in the past, as if preoccupied with a different problem.

  “The destroyer did not display any new or unknown capability,” Nuvaash said. “Its captain simply used its close defense weapons in a novel manner, as offensive weapons. None of our simulations predicted this because the tactic was suicidal, as was demonstrated by the destruction of the craft.”

  That much was true, but he looked away from the admiral. He should have anticipated something like this.

  “Humans do not put the same value on life as we do,” the admiral said, “not even their own. A Speaker for the Enemy should understand this.”

  “The admiral is correct.”

  e-Lapeela gestured dismissively and for a moment returned his attention to his desktop.

  The truth was, Nuvaash had never noticed Humans to be any less attached to life than were Varoki. But wha
t in a Varoki would be seen as an act of courage and self-sacrifice was, in a Human, always judged differently by e-Lapeela and others like him, including the new governor of K’tok.

  Nuvaash had spent many months with Human staffs when serving on combined fleet exercises. Humans displayed a barely contained nervous energy, like a powerful caged animal, which he had never seen completely unleashed except perhaps in some of their appallingly violent athletic contests. In contrast, they possessed enormous capacity for beauty, surrounded themselves with it to the point that it became invisible to them. Nuvaash remembered riding in the lift of a tall office building on Earth and in the lift hearing the most hauntingly beautiful music he could ever remember, music so sweet and melancholy it had nearly reduced him to tears, while the Humans ignored it, or in some cases hummed along. Most of them could whistle or sing, could do so beautifully, and simply took the gift for granted. Didn’t they see what they had?

  Nuvaash partly understood e-Lapeela’s aversion to Humans, at least the part based on fear and envy. He felt its tug as well, more strongly of late, But if he let himself become slave to those base instincts, what was to become of him?

  “How can a close defense laser do the sort of damage we experienced?” the admiral said, pulling Nuvaash’s thoughts back to the cruiser and the present.

  “It was designed in response to the new armored nose caps we began deploying on missiles two years ago, Admiral. It has a diameter of ten meters and a virtual focal array of twenty, which is why the mounts are so clearly visible on the exterior of their destroyers. Some of their cruisers have been refitted with them as well. They emit in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum and the combination of short wavelength and very large focal array gives them considerable power at range.

  “How serious was the damage?”

  “Cruiser Four-Two-Eight was a total loss, of course, when it exited jump space into a planetoid. A fire lance hit disabled the jump drive of Four-Two-Nine and the captain jettisoned the entire module to avoid contamination. It can maneuver but will use most of its reaction mass to decelerate and return to our fleet rendezvous. It will arrive in twelve days. Five-Two-Two has only intermittent power, has lost its coil gun and most of its sensor array, and is not immediately repairable. Five-Oh-One is lightly damaged and will be operational as soon as we are.”