by David Weber
"You hear who's in command of this shit squadron?" someone asked, and Aubrey glanced at the men clustered around the chart, surprised by the surly tone of the question.
"Yeah," someone else said with profound disgust. "Harrington."
"Oh, Christ!" the first voice groaned. "We're all gonna die," it went on with a sort of morbid satisfaction. "You seen the kinds'a casualty lists she comes up with?"
"Yep," the second voice agreed. "They're gonna dump us right in the crapper, and she's gonna win another medal by flushing our asses down it."
"Not if I can help it," a third voice muttered. "She wants to play hero, that's fine, but I got better things to do than..."
Aubrey's concentration on the grumbling conversation was abruptly interrupted when someone kicked the frame of his bunk.
"Hey, Snotnose!" a deep voice said. "Get your ass off my rack."
Aubrey looked up in astonishment, and the speaker glared at him. The hulking, dark-haired man was much older than Aubrey, with a tough face and scarred knuckles. There were five golden hash marks on his cuff, each indicating three Manticoran years, almost five T-years, of service, but he was only a second-class power tech. That meant Aubrey was actually senior to him, yet he felt anything but senior as cold brown eyes sneered at him.
"I think you've made a mistake," he said as calmly as he could. "This is my bunk."
"Oh no it isn't, Snotnose," the older man said unpleasantly.
"Check the chart," Aubrey said shortly.
"I don't give a flying fuck what the chart says. Now get your ass off my rack while you can still walk, Snotnose."
Aubrey blinked, then paled as the other clenched a large, dangerous-looking fist and buffed its knuckles on his sleeve with an ugly grin. The younger man darted a look around the bay, but aside from the small knot of six or seven who'd accompanied his tormentor, there was no one else present, and none of the others looked inclined to take his side. They were all older than him, he realized, and none seemed to hold the rates men their age should have. At least half of them were grinning as unpleasantly as the power tech in front of him, and aside from one stocky, fidgety SBA whose nervous eyes kept flitting away from the confrontation, the ones who weren't smiling seemed totally indifferent to the scene.
So far in his Navy career, Aubrey had managed to avoid anything like this, but he wasn't stupid. He knew he was in trouble, yet instinct said if he caved in now the consequences would haunt him long after this episode was over. But instinct was matched by fear, for he'd never had a violent confrontation, much less an actual fight, and the grinning power tech out-massed him by at least fifty percent.
"Look," he said, still trying to sound calm, "I'm sorry, but I got here first."
"You're right, you are sorry," the power tech sneered. "In fact, you're just about the sorriest piece of shit I've laid eyes on in months, Snotnose. And you're gonna look a hell of a lot sorrier if I have to tell you to move your pink little ass again."
"I'm not moving," Aubrey said flatly. "Pick another bunk."
Something ugly flashed in those brown eyes. It was almost a light of vicious joy, and the power tech licked his lips as if in anticipation of a special treat.
"You just made a big mistake, Snotnose," he whispered, and his left hand flashed out. It locked in the neck of Aubrey's undress coverall, and the younger man felt a stab of pure terror as it yanked him off the bunk. He caught the others wrist in both hands, trying to pull it away from his collar, but it was like wrestling with a tree. "Say good night, Snotnose," the power tech crooned, and his right fist drew clear back beside his ear.
"Freeze!" The single word cracked like a gunshot, and the power tech's head whipped around. His lips drew back, but there was something else in his eyes now, and Aubrey turned his own head, fighting for breath as the hand twisted in his coverall choked him.
A woman stood in the berthing bay hatch, hands on hips, and her level eyes were every bit as cold as the power tech's. But that was the only similarity between them, for the woman looked as if she'd just stepped out of a recruiting poster. There were seven gold hash marks on her cuff, her shoulder carried three chevrons and rockers centered on the ancient golden anchor of a boatswains mate instead of the star other branches used to indicate a senior master chief petty officer, and her eyes swept the frozen bay like a subzero wind.
"Get your hands off him, Steilman," she said flatly, with a pronounced Gryphon accent. The power tech looked at her for another moment, then opened his hand with a scornful flick. Aubrey half fell back across the bunk, then struggled back to his feet, pale cheeks blotched with red. He was grateful for the senior master chief's intervention and knew it had just saved him from a brutal beating, but he was also young enough to feel the shame of needing to be saved.
"Anyone want to tell me what's going on here?" she asked with deadly calm. No one spoke, and her lip curled contemptuously. "Talk to me, Steilman," she said softly.
"It was just a misunderstanding," the power tech said in the tone of a man who didn't particularly care that his audience knew he was lying. "This snotnose took my bunk."
"Did he, now?" The woman stepped into the bay, and the onlookers drifted out of her way as if by magic. She glanced at the chart, then looked at Aubrey. "Your name Wanderman?" she asked in a much less threatening tone, and he nodded.
"Y-yes, Senior Master Chief," he managed, and flushed darker as his voice broke.
"Just 'Bosun' will do, Wanderman," she replied, and Aubrey inhaled in surprise. Only one person was called "Bosun" by the crew of a Queen’s ship. That person was the senior noncom in its complement, and the bosun, as his instructors had made very clear to him, stood directly at the right hand of God.
"Yes, Bosun," he managed, and she nodded, then looked back at Steilman.
"According to this," her head jerked at the chart, "that's his bunk. And in case you hadn't noticed, Wanderman's a first-class. Unless my memory betrays me, that makes him senior to a career fuck-up like you, doesn't it, Steilman?"
The power tech's lips tightened and his eyes flickered, but he didn't speak, and she smiled.
"I asked you a question, Steilman," she said, and he clenched his teeth.
"Yeah, I guess it does," he said in an ugly tone. She cocked her head, and he added a surly "Bosun" to his reply.
"Yes, it does," she confirmed. She looked back at the chart again, then tapped one of the unclaimed upper bunks, the one furthest from both the hatch and the head. "I think this would be an ideal place for you, Steilman. Log in."
The power tech's shoulders were tight, but his eyes fell from her cold, level gaze and he stamped across to the chart. He fed in his chip and painted the indicated bunk, and she nodded.
"There, you see? A little guidance, and even you can find your bunk." Aubrey watched the entire proceeding with an icy worm gnawing at his belly. He was delighted to see Steilman get his comeuppance, yet he dreaded what the power tech would do to him once the Bosun left.
"All right, all of you fall in," she said, pointing to the green stripe across the decksole, and Aubrey stood. The others shuffled resentfully into a line as he crossed to join them, and the Bosun folded her hands behind her and surveyed them expressionlessly.
"My name is MacBride," she said flatly. "Some of you, like Steilman, already know me, and I know all about you. You, for example, Coulter." She pointed at another power tech, a tall, narrow-built man with pitted cheeks and eyes that refused to meet hers. "I'm sure your captain was delighted to see your thieving backside. And you, Tatsumi." She gave the fidgety sick berth attendant a stern glare. "If I catch you sniffing any Sphinx green in my ship, you're going to wish I'd only stuffed you out an airlock."
She paused, as if inviting comment. No one spoke, but Aubrey felt resentment and hatred welling up about him like poison, and his nerves crawled. He'd never imagined anything like this in a modern navy, yet he knew he should have. Any force the size of the RMN had to have its share of thieves and bullies and God alone
knew what else, and his heart sank as he realized the other men in this berthing bay were among the worst the Navy had to offer. What in the name of God was he doing here?
"There's not one of you, except Wanderman, who isn't here because your last skipper could hardly wait to get rid of you," MacBride went on. "I'm happy to say that most of the rest of your crewmates are like him, not you, but I thought we'd just have a little welcoming chat. You see, if any of you gentlemen step out of line in my ship, you're going to think a planet fell on you. And you'd better pray to God I deal with you myself, because if you ever wind up in front of Lady Harrington, you'll find yourself in hack so fast your worthless ass won't catch up with you till you land in the stockade. And you'll stay in hack so long you'll be old and gray even with prolong before you see daylight again. Trust me. I've served with her before, and the Old Lady will eat the whole candy-ass lot of you so-called hard cases for breakfast, without salt." She spoke calmly, without passion, and somehow that gave her words even greater weight. She wasn't making threats; she was stating facts, and Aubrey felt a sort of animal fear superimposing itself on the others' resentment and hostility.
"You remember what happened the last time you and I locked up, Steilman?" MacBride asked softly, and the power tech's nostrils flared. He said nothing, and she smiled thinly. "Well, don't worry. You go right ahead and try me again if you want. Wayfarer has a fine doctor." Muscles lumped along Steilman's jaw, and MacBride's thin smile grew. Although she was a sturdily built woman, Aubrey couldn't quite believe what she seemed to be saying, until he glanced sideways at Steilman and saw the fear in the burly power techs eyes.
"Now this is the way its going" MacBride said, sweeping them all with her eyes once more. "You worthless screw-ups are not going to screw up in my ship. You are going to do your jobs, and you're going to keep your noses clean, and the first one of you who doesn't will regret it, deeply. Is that clear?" No one answered and she raised her voice. "I said is that clear?" A ragged chorus of assents answered, and she nodded. "Good." She turned as if to leave, then paused. "There's just one more thing," she said calmly. "Wanderman's assigned to this bay because I didn't have anyplace else to put him. You'll find a half-dozen Marines joining you shortly, and I'd advise you to behave yourselves. I'd especially advise you to be very sure that nothing, ah, unfortunate happens to Wanderman. If he should as much as stub his toe, I personally promise you that every single one of you will wish you'd never been born. I don't care what you got away with in your last ship. I don't care what you'd like to get away with in mine. Because, people, what you will get away with is nothing."
Her voice was like ice, and she smiled again, then turned and strode from the compartment. Aubrey Wanderman wanted, more than he'd ever wanted anything else in his life, to run after her, but he knew he couldn't, and he swallowed hard as he turned to face the others.
Steilman glared at him with naked, undisguised hatred, lips working. It took every ounce of Aubrey's courage not to back away from the power tech, but he stood his ground, trying to look unintimidated, and Steilman spat on the deck.
"It ain't over, Snotnose," he promised softly. "We're gonna be in the same ship a long time, and snotnoses have accidents." He bared his teeth. "Even bosuns can have accidents."
He turned away, towing his battered locker towards the bunk MacBride had assigned him, and Aubrey sank back onto his own bunk and tried to hide the muscle tremors of reaction racing through him. He'd never heard such ugly, venomous hatred in a voice before, certainly never directed at him. It wasn't fair! He hadn't done anything to Steilman, but the power tech had smeared his own dream of what Navy service was supposed to be like with something sticky and evil. It was as if Steilman soiled the very air he breathed, and the dark, ugly streak inside him reached out to Aubrey like a sick hunger.
Aubrey Wanderman shivered on his bunk, trying to pretend he wasn't afraid, and hoped desperately that some of those Marines MacBride had mentioned turned up soon.
Chapter NINE
Honor Harrington sat in her command chair, one hand caressing the treecat in her lap, as HMS Wayfarer decelerated towards the central terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction at the eighty-percent power setting the Navy allowed as its normal maximum. Vulcan had completely stripped the freighter's original bridge and refitted it with what could have passed for a regular warships command stations, but one look at Lieutenant Kanehama’s power settings gave the lie to that illusion, Honor thought dryly, for Wayfarer's "maximum power" was only 153.6 g.
An impeller drive vessels nodes generated a pair of inclined, plate-like gravity waves which trapped a pocket of normal space in their wedge-shaped grasp. The ship floated in that pocket, like a surfer poised in the curl of a comber which, in theory, could have been accelerated instantaneously to light-speed, taking the vessel with them. But minor practical considerations, like the fact that it would have turned the ship's crew into paste, mitigated against it, and the fact that the physics of the drive required the bow and stern aspects of the wedge to be open limited the maximum speed of any starship, as well. Whatever its possible acceleration, the open throat of a ship's wedge meant it had to worry about particle densities and the rare but not unknown micro-meteorite. A warships particle and antiradiation fields let her pull a maximum normal-space velocity of .8 light-speed in the conditions which obtained within the average star system (max speeds were twenty-five percent lower in h-space, where particle densities were higher, and somewhat higher in areas of particularly low densities), but merchant designers wouldn't accept the expense and mass penalties of generators that powerful. As a consequence, merchantmen were limited to a maximum n-space velocity of about .7 c and a max h-space velocity of no more than .5 c... and Wayfarer was a merchant design.
The fact that an impeller wedges throat was almost three times as "deep" as its stern aspect also explained why every tactician's dream was to cross an opponent's "T," since the wedge itself was impenetrable by any known weapon and its sides were protected by weaker but still extremely powerful gravity sidewalls. Energy weapons could burn through a sidewall at close enough range, but a raking shot down the wedge's throat both exposed one to far less return fire and also gave one an unobstructed shot at ones target. But Honor’s greatest concern was her ships' sluggishness, for they were going to be slower in sustained flight than any warship they met... and they were also going to be slower to accelerate.
A ship's maximum acceleration rate depended upon three factors: its impeller strength, its inertial compensator's efficiency, and its mass. Like impellers, military-grade compensators were more powerful than the far cheaper installations merchantmen mounted, and the Caravan-class were the size of many superdreadnoughts. Given equal compensator efficiency, a smaller ship could dump a higher proportion of the inertial forces of its acceleration into the "inertial sump" of its wedge, which explained why lighter warships could run away from heavier ones despite the fact that their maximum velocities were equal. The smaller ship couldn't go any faster, but it could reach maximum speed more quickly, and unless its heavier opponent was able to close the range before it did so, it could never be forced into action. The situation was even worse for Wayfarer than it would have been for a ship of the wall, however, for an SD her size could have pulled over twice her acceleration.
All of which meant that Wayfarer maneuvered like an octogenarian turtle and that bringing an enemy to action would require guile and cunning.
Honor smiled wryly at the thought. It would take some getting used to, but she and her captains had spent hours discussing possible tactics and then trying them out in simulations and the limited time their rushed deployment had allowed for maneuvers. No doubt some of their ideas would prove impractical in action, but she'd been conscious of a growing confidence as they explored their ships' capabilities, and they did have one major advantage. If the bad guys thought they were merchantmen, then they could pretty much count on the enemy's closing the range for them. Which was where the cunning an
d guile came in, for it would be up to her to convince the enemy Wayfarer truly was a fat, juicy, defenseless prize until it was too late for him to avoid her.
Honor let her eyes run over the displays deployed about her command chair with a sense of satisfaction. Parnassus and Scheherazade hung neatly off Wayfarers port and starboard quarters, holding station clear of her hundred-kilometer-wide wedge, while Gudrid brought up the rear of their diamond-shaped formation. Their intervals were professionally tight, and given the time constraints, Honor was pleased with how well their working up had gone. Not that she wouldn't dearly have loved just a little more time. Wayfarer had completed her acceptance trials with flying colors three weeks before, closely followed by Parnassus and Scheherazade, but Gudrid had been allowed less than two weeks from trials to deployment. Captain MacGuire had done wonders, and he and Commander Stillman projected a confident attitude, but Honor knew both of them were concerned over the potential weaknesses, human and hardware, which they might simply have had too little time to find. For that matter, Honor shared their concerns. She'd deliberately had the old sweats with the worst records assigned to Wayfarer and Parnassus, where she and Alice could ride herd on them, yet she was acutely aware of the potential weakness of her mix of newbies and embittered rejects. Virtually all her departments were still shaking down, and she would have given two fingers off her left hand for even one more week to drill and train her people. But the Admiralty had been emphatic about the need to get TG 1037 into Breslau space, and, given her own intelligence briefings, she couldn't disagree.
