Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

“Mr. President, the French are the ones laying the charges. They must have a basis of action; a Board of Inquiry is like a Probable Cause hearing or a Grand Jury in the civilian world. Evidence is presented and the Board determines if there is cause for further action, and recommends to the convening authority what that action should be.”

  “Sir, I haven’t polled the people in my meeting, but I’m certain the consensus is that the French have nothing to go on and if they think they do, we can demolish it.”

  “I understand, sir. We will agree to whatever you decide -- although we feel that the sooner this is over the better.”

  He hung up. “The President will try to get the earliest possible date. He’ll shoot for Wednesday, as we agreed, but privately tells me that he’ll settle on a week from Monday -- like us, he sees no advantage to dragging this out.”

  He looked down the table, singling out the senior JAG officer. “We need a second counsel for Lieutenant Cooper, who do you recommend?”

  Admiral Kinsella spoke. “Admiral Delgado, I have a question of the JAG.”

  “Admiral Kinsella.”

  “Admiral, Captain Markham. Captain, I understand that you have a JAG junior counsel named Biederman, formerly a US Marine.”

  The JAG officer shrugged. “He came into the Corps as a captain, having served two years as a prosecutor in San Antonio. He applied for the Fleet; we’ve not had very many applications from Marine JAG officers for the Fleet. We accepted him.”

  “I would like to recommend this officer as the second counsel for Lieutenant Cooper, Admiral,” Admiral Kinsella asked. “As you know, I have an affinity for Marines; I think this officer is just what the doctor ordered.”

  “He is rather junior, Admiral,” the JAG captain demurred.

  “Lieutenant Cooper is rather junior. Plus of course, there is the delicious coincidence.”

  “Admiral?” Admiral Delgado inquired.

  “Far be it for the Fleet to take sides in a dispute between France and the Aft Trojans -- but the movie that played last night before the final showing of Armageddon was called Deep Impact. In that movie, the asteroid was named Biederman. It didn’t come close to France, though.”

  Admiral Delgado choked and sputtered. The JAG captain spoke up. “I’m not sure of the applicability. Marine Captain Biederman is just a full lieutenant in the Port branch of the Fleet. He has minimal experience in military jurisprudence, although he was a civilian prosecutor.”

  “I imagine that he didn’t sit on his bottom much in San Antonio,” Admiral Kinsella stated. “Commander Jacobsen has sat a court-martial and two boards of inquiry prior to this. I think that as a knowledge transfer task, this would be ideal to bring Lieutenant Biederman up to speed.”

  Admiral Delgado regained some control. “Captain Markham, I don’t know the President as well as others at this table. Still, I’m confident that Admiral Kinsella is very correct. If the President was presented with this choice, he’d pick Lieutenant Biederman in a heartbeat.”

  “I was told that this was an important Board, and the results were top priority.”

  “Captain,” Admiral Kinsella spoke up, “you left out the word ‘desired’ before ‘result’ in what you just said, although it was clearly implied. Lieutenant Biederman will assist Commander Jacobsen in attempting to secure no finding of fault with Lieutenant Cooper’s actions. That said, while there are those of us who desire a certain outcome, the Fleet would be worse off if it wasn’t a just and accurate outcome. It is one thing to wish Commander Jacobsen good luck; I won’t have talk of a general ‘desired outcome.’”

  There were just a few other comments and then Admiral Delgado stood. “Everyone here has things to do. Go do them. Everyone but Lieutenant Cooper; I wish to have a word with you, Lieutenant. The rest of you, get to it!”

  Becky normally would have quailed at being singled out. There had been too much water under the bridge in the last few weeks, She resolutely met the admiral’s eyes and stayed in her seat.

  “Two things, Lieutenant,” he said as he resumed his seat after they were alone. “If you’d produced the quantity of documentation about the repairs that you did, and I was your supervisor, I’d have had a word with you about wasting your time. I am, demonstrably, wrong. Captain Gilly said that you felt incumbent upon yourself to document the work being done and the work intended. He said you weren’t a skilled welder, but you were adequate to produce the documentation and preliminary plans.

  “For the last day, every engineering officer available has poured over the documentation. The conclusions were uniformly the same: you did nothing beyond oversee the design and construction of the support structures, and you documented the critical welds and more.

  “Your proposed integration plan was basically a direct copy of the manual. Everyone agreed that absent more information of French intentions, there was nothing else you could do.

  “I have no intention of allowing a Fleet officer to be railroaded. Not going to happen! If the French have proof of something, we’ll listen but that is extremely unlikely.

  “Now, we’ll put that aside; this is one of those minor bumps on the road we all occasionally face in life. Eagle told you a little about Ceres, did he not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No later than the end of next week, you’ll be headed that way. You’ll teach the class on sticky tents and rescue bubbles that you’ve made so famous.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At some point, I have no idea of when, one of the Indian colonists will ask if you’d like a walnut. They are growing some walnut trees there, and while they don’t have large harvests of walnuts as yet, they are justifiably proud of their success so far. Take the nut, but do nothing with it. Return it to me. Nothing else. No skulking around, no Double Oh Seven nonsense. Just bring it to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, you were asked a question. Anna or Krista.”

  Becky blinked. “I’m not sure.”

  “Suppose I told you that Admiral Kinsella has suggested ‘both’ for an answer?”

  “I don’t see how, sir.”

  “Miss Sanchez has months of rehabilitation ahead of her. Her doctor has said that for a couple of months she should concentrate on that... and that it would hurt her recovery if she tried to spend too much time working.”

  “I don’t think she could give it up willingly, sir.”

  “Perhaps not willingly. That’s not the right word. It’s close, but not right. Doing less might not be her preferred choice, but her best option in the long run.”

  “I think she’d need a powerful lot of convincing,” Becky said.

  “I intend to try to convince her.”

  “You, sir?” Becky was startled.

  “She is a treasure to all humanity, Lieutenant. I would never ask you to try to convince her to leave for a couple of months. I don’t dare try to suggest such a thing to Admiral Kinsella. I can’t guarantee success, but I can promise a solid attempt.

  “Do you know the name of the ship that was just christened at Psyche?”

  “Palm something or other,” Becky told him. “I didn’t recognize the word.”

  “Palmach. The name of the main Jewish resistance group during World War II and in the three years or so before Israel was created. It was instrumental in their victory in the first war against the Arabs.”

  Becky leaned down and put her forehead against the conference table. After a minute she looked at him. “I keep having my nose rubbed in my ignorance, sir.”

  “And people keep telling you that you’re young yet. Granted, there are people like Admiral Kinsella who read everything about everything, but most of us come to the realization later, rather than sooner -- that it’s a big world out there -- and that we are woefully ignorant. Then we start digging into things.

  “Connections, Lieutenant. Connections. A relates to B, which is something we’ve never explored before. So we find a good book on the subject and tear into it. Maybe sooner than lat
er we find we need to know about C and D as well, and we dig out books on them.”

  He picked up his phone. “Lieutenant Abbott, report to me and bring my briefcase.”

  A moment later a senior lieutenant, the admiral’s Flag Lieutenant, appeared. “Lieutenant Abbott, show Lieutenant Cooper the contents of my briefcase.”

  The young man dutifully lifted a large briefcase and put it on the conference table. He opened it to reveal a dozen thick books.

  “Most think I have husky Flag Lieutenants for security. They need to be husky to carry my book bag.”

  Becky gulped. There were a lot of books in the briefcase.

  “Is the Admiral perhaps contemplating my replacement?” the lieutenant asked.

  “You have, at most, another month, Bobby. Yes.”

  The lieutenant looked at Becky. “She might be big enough.”

  “Bobby, you could only hope to fill her shoes. No, you’ll be going with her, I expect. Not her with me.

  “God only knows why, but Admiral Kinsella likes Lieutenant Biederman -- someone I never heard of before today. At the end of his current assignment, he’ll come to me.”

  “Dare I ask where the lieutenant is going, sir? This one, not that one?” Admiral Delgado’s aide asked.

  Becky had no right to speak; no business to speak. “Points south,” she said simply.

  Admiral Delgado slapped his right hand on the conference table and laughed. “Exactly so. Bobbie, find someone large, stupid and incurious! Hand him my book bag and tell him to see me tomorrow at 0700. You shadow Lieutenant Cooper tomorrow, starting tomorrow at that time. I’m going back to bed for the rest of the day.”

  Chapter 9 -- The Inquiry

  The next day Becky spent with Commander Jacobsen and Lieutenant Biederman going over the records she’d submitted from the Miracle at Orleans.

  Captain Gilly was in and out, and mostly silently observed what was being said. The review was intense and eventually got to the point where she barely noticed his presence. It was late in the afternoon that they received their first break, coming from an unexpected source.

  They had been going over the timeline of the original accident, but not spending much time on detail. Lieutenant Biederman changed that.

  “I understand I’m an engineering layman,” he said, prefacing his remarks. “I don’t pretend to any expertise; I’m here because of my trial experience. I understand that and it’s not the first time by a long shot.

  “In general, in preparing a case for trial we spend an inordinate amount of time on the timeline. Time is everything, at trial.” Evidently that was supposed to be lawyer-joke but neither Becky, Captain Gilly nor Commander Jacobsen was amused.

  “Show the establishment shot taken in the fan compartment that the malfunction occurred in.”

  As junior, Lieutenant Abbott had been running the computer where the films had been archived. It was film that Becky had watched a dozen times by then. Lieutenant Biederman had fresh eyes and an entirely different point of view. He took the computer remote and ran the film forward to the point he wanted -- near the start where Becky swept the compartment with the camera to show the layout.

  “I’ve looked over the layout of the Orleans,” he said. “The reactor room was I guess I’d say, ‘aft’ for lack of a better term, of the fan compartment.” He used a laser pointer, indicating the rear wall of the fan compartment.

  “The report Lieutenant Cooper and Pilot Officer Malcolm submitted said that telemetry was adequate to show that the first two fans failed, the second fan disabling the reactor, causing it to scram. The reactor suffered a loss-of-coolant accident, and the containment ruptured, spreading radioactivity. Then the third fan failed.” He ran the laser pointer over the aft bulkhead of the fan compartment.

  “Like I said, I’m a layman. Just how did the fan damage the reactor? The wall is intact.”

  “It’s a bulkhead, not a wall,” Captain Gilly corrected.

  “The aft bulkhead isn’t damaged. The fan compartment and the reactor compartment were large compartments, access gained through corridors that ran along either side. The fan compartment bulkheads to one side show obvious damage from the fans failing. There is no damage between the reactor compartment and the fan compartment.”

  Captain Gilly didn’t hesitate -- he reached for the phone. “Admiral Delgado, it’s urgent.”

  He turned to Commander Jacobsen. “Run the telemetry logs again. Look for what acceleration transients there were.”

  “I remember that in spite of the calculated 200-gravity transient that they showed, but it wasn’t felt by anyone. The largest transient that the crew is reporting was 3.4 gravities with the failure of the first fan. I’ll verify, sir. That 200-gravity transient absorbed all of our attention. I’m sorry, sir,” Commander Jacobsen said the last words sheepishly.

  “Commander, you don’t have to be sorry. I was in the fan compartment a dozen times. A dozen times I saw that bulkhead and the question never occurred to me...” Captain Gilly turned his attention to the phone.

  “Admiral Delgado, Captain Gilly. We’ve discovered something anomalous about the original accident, sir. There was no penetration of the after bulkhead. From personal observation I noted that the compartment hatches had been closed at the time of the accidents, but were subsequently opened in the rescue efforts. I think we can safely assume that the hatch to the reactor room was also closed, but subsequently opened in the crew’s efforts to render assistance to those in the affected compartments.

  “There is no way debris from the fan failure made it into the reactor compartment. Yes, the reactor failed contemporaneously, but a quick guess is that it was the effects of a three and a half gravity acceleration transient. Sir, I submit that we need to find that reactor.”

  There was a pause as he listened to the other end then he laughed. “You should know that it was Lieutenant Biederman who noticed. Admiral Kinsella shows her worth again.”

  The next afternoon, they were called to a conference in Admiral Delgado’s office, with the President of the US and the Prime Minister of Australia present by videoconference.

  “I presented the French with our original start date,” the President told them. “They told me that it would take eighteen to twenty-four months to adequately prepare for the case. I laughed and told them that they either had evidence implicating Lieutenant Cooper as they’d intimated -- or they didn’t. I wasn’t going to waste the time of a half dozen or dozen officers for the next two years. I told them that Monday at 0800 is the drop-dead deadline. That we would hold the inquiry then, whether they were ready or not.

  “They screamed, they shouted -- they consulted with their allies. Even the Germans didn’t support them. They said the French had to have evidence that a person committed such a crime to charge them -- or not. If not, they should drop it.”

  Prime Minister Campbell spoke. “We told Germany that they in all respects qualify for the Federation. Turns out that they have a ship of their own, nearly ready to go. It’s privately financed, and the finance people made it clear that they thought the Federation rules about sovereignty and economic claims were far preferable to the rules proposed by the Bundestag. Since the investment is several billion Euros, the German government has bowed to the inevitable. They are going to be reasonable, their President told me. If the French have credible evidence that Lieutenant Cooper is guilty of this heinous crime, they will support them. Otherwise, not.”

  “The French have a prosecutor and a president of the inquiry arriving tomorrow. It would be a fantasy to assume they aren’t colluding,” the President told them. “They will both have minions and again, expect them to work together.

  “This will be the one and only time such a thing happens in the Federation,” the Australian Prime Minister added. “It’s a terrible precedent and we’re going to ban such things specifically, as soon as the gavel brings the inquiry to a close.”

  “What rules of evidence will be used?” Lieutenant Biederma
n asked.

  “I suspect it will be possession is nine-tenths of the law. By all means try for discovery, but you’re not going to get it,” the President told him.

  “I sent the Federation Council a memo yesterday,” Admiral Delgado said. “I’m happy to report that we found the object and it’s currently going to be installed in orbit around the moon, where it can be studied. Extensively studied, although it will be difficult. The reactor core has completely melted. The officer in charge of preliminary investigation tells me that there are many unexpected physical facts about what happens when a reactor core melts in zero-g. The reactor is now a sphere of mixed melt and there will be no physical evidence possible.

  “He is of the opinion that they hastily ejected the core because of the danger of a criticality event. They undoubtedly lost people getting it off the ship. While the core never detonated, it’s so radioactive and chemically hot even now it is not possible to approach safely. We are using remotes, working from a distance of a hundred kilometers and from behind heavy shielding even at that distance.

  “As for how this is going to help you, I don’t think it will. It’s been some weeks that the reactor has been subject to extreme heat and extreme radiation. The reactor and the attached equipment has completely melted, the physical structure has been hammered twice, by the radiation and the temperature.”

  An aide appeared, avoiding the camera on Admiral Delgado and dropped a piece of paper on his desk.

  The admiral glanced down and grimaced. “I was never guilty of passing notes in class in middle school. I did carve my initials into the reverse side of one of my desks. Now I appear to have seriously messed up.”

  He looked at the President.

  “It took most of the day to carefully move the reactor into synchronous orbit around the moon. The engineer on site reported that the reaction rate increased significantly during the move and attributed that to the accelerations employed, causing some separation of the reaction mass.

  “The reactor was installed in the equivalent of a geosynchronous orbit, located over the back side of the moon. The reaction slowed, but continues to accelerate, just not as rapidly as before. The engineer has asked for some neutron absorbing material -- it is problematic if it will arrive before the reactor goes critical. It is problematic how severe the ‘event’ will be.”