Rescue Branch (Kinsella Universe)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “It won’t mean anything.”

  “No, it won’t -- not to us and not to them. But Charlie, right now there are six billion very scared people back home. And if you think they are terrified, contemplate the eighteen off-world colonies we have. Sure, one day they expect to no longer be dependent on Earth, but that day isn’t yet. Another twenty or thirty years, Charlie, and the human race is going to be a lot safer than it is now... but not yet.

  “Inner planet security was just strapped down hard. Now, every ship in or around Earth has to have a working transponder or they’ll eat a nuclear weapon if someone doesn’t talk fast. Back home there are six billion believers in the Federation, Charlie, where before there weren’t but a pitiful few.”

  “So your concept is vindicated -- at the expense of Dick and the others.”

  Stephanie looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry you feel like this, Charlie. One day, I hope, you’ll understand.”

  “That’s never going to happen,” Charlie Rampling said with heat.

  “You have no idea how sorry I am about this, Charlie. There aren’t many people I’ve ever wanted to let my hair down with -- you were one.”

  “Couldn’t you at least be a little remorseful?”

  “We saved the human race, Charlie. Why should I feel remorseful about that? Do you think Dick wouldn’t have volunteered for the mission even if he’d known he would be killed -- but knowing he was saving billions of lives?”

  “You twist everything,” Charlie said bitterly.

  “I hold your ideas up to sunlight, Charlie.”

  Charlie shook her head. “You are so cold. I don’t know what I ever saw in you -- I don’t know what Dick saw in you.”

  “Charlie, I’m sorry, but I have work to do,” Stephanie said, turned and walked away.

  * * *

  Six weeks later Valley Forge once again took up orbit around Earth and supply and service ships swarmed up to take care of the ship’s needs.

  Stephanie had spent the time as a silent ghost, appearing at odd times, inspecting how things were going and then vanishing again. Most of the time she was in her cabin with only Doubting Thomas for company. Being a cat, Thomas understood one and only one treatment for any ill: he would hop up on Stephanie’s lap, laying quiet, only the continual rumble of his purr to mar the silence of cabin.

  It was going to be tough on Charlie, Stephanie knew, because the protocol for those who died of the plague was cremation. She’d raised no objection when Charlie claimed Dick’s remains.

  Two days after their return things had returned to something like routine. A captain knocked on her office door requesting admittance. He was tall and ruggedly handsome, bronzed and buff... even more interesting, he’d barely gotten in the door when John Gilly came through, right behind him.

  “I’m going to jack up my people on the shuttle deck,” Stephanie told John. “They are supposed to give me a head’s up when the brass arrives.” She waved at John's sleeve that now held three stars. “I’m glad that at long last the idiot in the Bureau of Personnel who’s been messing with your promotions for the last ten years has retired.”

  “Hello, Admiral,” he said mildly.

  She looked at him carefully. “John?”

  “You understand you were in and out before, and we were all very, very busy, right?” he told her.

  “John!”

  “Steph, my wife is dead, my daughter will be an invalid the rest of her life; another of those whose lungs was ruined was Admiral Delgado. He hung on at his desk for too long.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Tell me that they picked you, John.”

  “The good news is that they did, Stephanie. The bad news is that I retired the day my wife died.”

  “Not me,” she said with assurance. “I’m too junior. Tell me they haven’t picked me.”

  “They picked Herb Castleman -- he’s a good guy -- he was one of the Navy pilots who refused a mission back in the mutiny, but by then no further dramatic gestures were required.”

  Stephanie breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you, Lord!”

  “Maybe,” John told her. “There’s a rainbow inside every dark cloud. And there are black clouds surrounding the rainbows. Herb is a by-the-book sailor, Stephanie. You’ve been relieved.”

  “Relieved?”

  “Yes, Herb thinks admirals should command fleets -- not single ships.”

  The old Stephanie showed for a second. “Foo! I was hoping to sneak that past everyone at least until I finish this mission!”

  “Stephanie, Dr. Leavitt, your ship’s surgeon, passed a very bad report on your mental health, saying that you haven’t handled Dick’s death well.”

  “And you think retiring when your wife died was handling that well?” Stephanie snapped.

  “I’m not commanding a couple of billion dollars of starship with two hundred people aboard, Stephanie -- you are.”

  She stared at him, then at the other captain. “John, could I talk to you privately?”

  “No, Stephanie, this is Deacon Parsons, the new captain of Valley Forge.”

  “Fine and wonderful,” she told him. “I’ll go quietly, I promise. You won’t need anyone in white coats, even. I just have a few words to say to you, John, in private.”

  “Stephanie -- just say what you have to say.”

  “Everyone thinks I’ve gone off the deep end after Dick was killed. I swear, John, Dick was a Marine. There was no choice for any of the orders I gave. If I’d have tried to shield him from the mission, he’d have hated my guts.”

  “I imagine so, Stephanie,” he replied.

  “What really hurt is that Charlie doesn’t understand. Losing Dick -- well, Dick and I made an agreement just after he proposed. We’re both realists, and we both knew we were going in harm’s way. We promised each other that if the worst came, we’d grieve for a couple of minutes and then continue the mission.

  “Charlie -- that hurt, John. I don’t have many friends and I’ve tried everything I can to explain to her that Dick meant as much to me as he did to her. I just don’t show it the same way.”

  “Admiral Delgado, as one of his last official acts was going to designate one of the ships under construction the Richard Rampling.”

  “Tell me you stopped that,” Stephanie said, horrified.

  “I stopped that. I even stopped Howie’s successor from naming it after Dick’s father. She’s going to be Antietam.”

  “Thank you, John. As I said, Charlie’s attitude has hurt more than what happened to Dick. We both knew we had dangerous jobs -- it was part and parcel of who we are. Were. Charlie...”

  Stephanie spread her hands helplessly.

  John nodded. “I was pretty broken up when my wife died. We do what we do to keep people like her safe. I felt like I personally betrayed her. My daughter... her long-term prognosis is pretty awful. There’s no baseline yet, but the doctors say the damage is extensive and permanent. None of us, Stephanie, are immune when things go wrong.”

  Stephanie sighed, focused on her own misery. “I just thought Charlie would understand,” she told him.

  “Of course, if wishes were cows we’d be hip deep in BS.” She looked at John, then at the captain. “So, I’m relieved, eh? Has anyone mentioned to Admiral what’s-his-name that we don’t have enough ships yet to have fleets, and that even if we tried, there would be no way to keep a fleet in company while on High Fan?”

  “One or two people have, yes, Stephanie,” John told her.

  “If you’re retired, what are you doing here shilling for the man?” she inquired.

  His eyes held hers steadily and Stephanie laughed. “Oh my! Someone really has the wind up! No, I’ve not lost it.” She laughed again. “I have a new project plan to give the Federation President.”

  John rolled his eyes. “Every time you have a new plan, everything gets turned upside down.”

  “You bet! Do you understand that I was seriously intending on nuking a ship? In fa
ct, if I’d caught the bugger before it got back to Earth, I would have nuked the ship?”

  She turned to Captain Parsons. “You do understand, that if you command a ship like this, one day the decision could devolve on you?”

  “Yes I do, Admiral. I’m a special sort of maverick, Admiral Kinsella.”

  “And what kind of a maverick is that, Captain?”

  “For two years I was a weapons officer aboard a nuclear sub. I got riffed and took a shot at flying. The next thing I knew, I was flying spaceships. Cool! I am the only formally qualified nuclear mission commander in the Fleet.”

  “Hey!” Stephanie said, pretending to be shocked. “I took the short course! Three days! Two hours on handling the weapons codes and two days and six hours discussing the morality of turning people into radioactive gas.”

  Stephanie was like her old self. “Captain, have you heard from those who think I made a mistake by allowing my husband along on the same ship as I commanded?”

  “Yes, Admiral. I’m not sure how I feel about the matter myself... my experience says it’s not always a good idea.”

  “I quite agree,” Stephanie told him.

  “On the other hand, we were adults. I was going to be away two years. I wasn’t prepared to give up my marriage for that long. I know, back in the day naval officers were frequently gone for a year or two at a time. Of course, back then society's divorce rate wasn’t running at 50+% either. Dick and I talked it over, rationally, carefully and agreed that he would come along.

  “As I told Capt’n... er, Admiral Gilly, I grieve that Dick died. I don’t grieve that because of his sacrifice, and the sacrifice of the others -- we learned about the threat and were able to act to mitigate it, however much we did mitigate it. One day I hope my mother-in-law will understand why I did what I did, but in the meantime I can stand on my bridge, looking at a feed of the Earth below and know I saved billions of people. And that Dick played his part in it too.”

  “You said something about another plan, Stephanie?” John Gilly asked.

  “Well, a proposal and a couple of related suggestions,” she told him.

  “You mentioned about how admirals should command fleets and captains should command ships, and I said we aren’t going to have fleets for the foreseeable future.

  “Right now a survey captain has an executive officer, who is in charge of the ship’s administration, and a chief scientist who is in charge of the civilians. Someday we’ll have dedicated warships, not seconded to survey, and they’ll not have the science department that a survey ship requires.

  “Right now my rank is ‘Rear Admiral, upper half,’ that is, I’ve got a second star on my shipsuit.

  “I want to reorganize the upper ranks from ship captain up to rear admiral. Yes, a captain should command a typical warship. A captain should have ten or fifteen years experience and have an executive officer, and if the ship is in survey, a chief scientist.

  “At first glance there doesn’t seem to be any necessity for a flag officer aboard your average warship. That’s true enough, but begs the question. Our communications are limited to as fast as ships can go. Officers, as I was, are going to be a long ways away from home and may have to make decisions that are beyond the scope of competent ship handling.

  “I was confident that my decisions were correct, but all I had to go on was my judgment and faith. It would not hurt if, on very remote duty, there was a senior officer to hand, a flag officer on whom such far-reaching decisions could be shared.

  “So, I propose that we ditch the two grades of rear admiral and just have rear admirals with two stars. We would add commodores, who supervise patrols and deployments. Commodores would provide additional guidance in matters beyond the day-to-day ship’s operations when a ship would be away from headquarters for an extended period.

  “Rear admirals, candidly, would be officers to command bases. At least for the time being, I can’t see where they would have any function as ship commanders. Vice admirals -- they could accompany a ship that was on a long, remote deployment, with a flag captain to deal with the ship handling.”

  “Doesn’t that rear admiral tasking mess you up? You want to command a base like I’d want to command a squad of short arm inspectors.”

  He paused. “We have a few smaller ships now patrolling the asteroid belt and the inner system. Those are commanded by either solid commanders or brilliant lieutenant commanders. I don’t think it would be wise to make those in command of such vessels full captains.”

  “As I said, an average warship -- not a frigate or corvette.”

  He chuckled. “I love what you did with those.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Both frigates and corvettes are almost the same physical size and have roughly identical crew sizes. You said mission, nothing else, should determine the classification. Corvettes are fast ships that go from Point A to Point B -- messengers in other words. Frigates are armed, whereas corvettes aren’t.”

  “Of course. Below a hundred, the crew of a starship starts losing redundancy, increasing the risk that a malf will be fatal. Messengers need to be intent on delivering their messages -- not armed well enough to contemplate getting into trouble.”

  “Where does that leave you, Rear Admiral Kinsella?” John said, emphasizing her rank.

  “Oh, yes. I do believe that Fleet bureaus also should be commanded by rear admirals. That is, the Bureaus of Personnel, Weapons, Ships, Supply... those sorts of establishments. Oh wait! I forgot -- we need a Bureau of Research or maybe, better, a Bureau of Science. I know just the person you could get to head that up!”

  “I wonder who that could be? Probably someone who has a sterling project plan on her desk, just waiting for the right person to ramrod it!” Admiral Gilly said, a grin on his face.

  “Oh! That would be a good idea. Did I mention that I have a project plan?”

  “I imagined that one existed,” John told her, “but not what it’s about. Surprise me.”

  “Like I said, I have a couple. For the first, I’ve been doing research on the conditions of wherever it is we’re at, when we’re on High Fan. We know it’s a different, very much smaller, universe than our own. We know that a lot of the fundamental physical constants are different there than here. And, of course, there is the bare fact there is nothing we can detect there.”

  “I’ve heard that a time or two,” Admiral Gilly replied dryly. “Usually just before someone hits us up for more money to study this or that.”

  “I was hoping to find out if we could use radio or lasers to communicate there, but evidently not,” Stephanie told him. “Then I did some work on quantum theory in that universe and while nothing was as I expected, and it didn’t make sense; I did get another idea about quantum entanglement.

  “I’ve come up with a project plan or two before, as you may recall. Those have all received mixed reviews because I didn’t consult all of those in authority. I was thinking that if I was to become the head of something like the Bureau of Science I’d probably have to hand my little ideas off to someone else -- if nothing else, to set a good example for all the little munchkins.”

  “Something like that,” John Gilly told her.

  She slid a stack of bound reports towards him. “Let me know what ya’ll decide, okay? Think of that as my job application.”

  He looked at her critically for a few seconds. “You expected this.”

  “Of course. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my six years as an admiral, it’s that the better you do, the more they want to sideline you. I survived as long as I have because I hid my light under a bushel and half the people deciding about me never heard of me. After the plague...”

  Everyone had heard of Valley Forge’s role in saving the planet. It wasn’t fair; it was counter-intuitive, but Stephanie had gotten a thousand less times publicity leading the first interstellar expedition that she’d gotten for returning a few days late with the word of the plague.

  Chapter 3 --
Stone Face

  For a year, Stephanie worked steadily building up the Bureau of Science. One of her first acts was to put two sharp theoretical physicists together with a half dozen hardware gurus and get them working on quantum entanglement.

  There had been many experiments done showing that “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein had called it, worked; but no one had been able to put it together into a workable system. A month after they started work, a lab in Pasadena picked up a microphone and spoke to a base on Mars without any time lag and a few seconds later spoke to a ship in orbit around the asteroid Ceres.

  A year and three weeks after losing command of the Valley Forge Stephanie checked her email to find a brief note from John Gilly's secretary. “Admiral John Gilly(retired) announces the death of beloved daughter Margaret, yet another victim of the plague.” There followed the dates, times and places for a memorial service, a graveside service and a wake.

  She hugged him when she saw him and he sighed and told her, “When last we spoke, I mentioned we didn't have a very long baseline on what happens to victims of the plague. We have a long enough baseline now to know it's very bad.”

  Stephanie nodded. “I heard, John. A person's lungs and intestines are damaged, and that damage cascades to their liver, kidneys and heart. A cold, a paper cut -- anything after that -- is a critical illness.”

  He nodded. “I want to talk to you, Stephanie, later. After this...” he waved around the nave of the church they were in, waiting for the memorial service to start.

  “Sure, John, anything you want.”

  He grinned, a hollow shell of his old self. “Exactly right, Admiral Professor Doctor Kinsella!”

  It was the second time Stephanie had had to go through the rituals associated with death. If it had been up to her, she'd have skipped all of that for Dick. Dick himself hadn't been there for his own funeral, after all. Solar mirrors were used to incinerate his body, and then the urn was launched on a vector that would intersect the sun.