by David Weber
With a sigh, he turned back to his terminal. Next file down was that of Spacer Third Class Susanne Loomis. With a brief but fervent hope that this one had done a better job of keeping a low profile, he began to read.
* * *
“Gill?” the foreman’s voice came over the earphone. “You awake in there?”
Gill—Alvis to his wife, Senior Chief Petty Officer Alvis Massingill to the people who signed off on his pay packets, Gill to everyone else—rolled his eyes. It was the third time in as many hours that the foreman had called with the same prompt in the exact same words. “Still awake,” he promised. “Why? Is there some reason I need to be?”
“Just get ready,” the foreman growled. “Should be any time now.”
“Right,” Gill said.
Though to be honest, he’d been tempted to take a nap more than once during the hours he’d been stuck here in Mars’s 05-098/187-13-P inspection passageway. He didn’t know what was holding up the show out there, and probably didn’t want to.
But it didn’t bode well for the future. The sloop-de-do project already had a scheduled completion time of over ten months, and if they couldn’t even get it started on time the reality was likely to far outpace the projection.
“Okay, here we go,” the foreman said. “Starting the cut…now.”
There was the brief sizzle of a plasma torch on metal, the noise cutting off as the foreman killed his mike. Flicking on his light, Gill switched on the hand-held monitor linked to the twenty temperature sensors he’d spent his first hour in here placing against the dull metal of the inner hull.
And with that horrendously complicated task completed, it was back to waiting.
Waiting, and brooding.
This was criminal. It really was. Not just because the Manticorans were wrecking a perfectly good battlecruiser, but also because the whole thing was going to cost way more than Chancellor Breakwater’s numbers indicated. That should have been obvious to anyone with a working brain. It had certainly been obvious to Gill himself.
But had First Lord of the Admiralty Cazenestro asked him to testify before Parliament? Of course not. Cazenestro and Defense Minister Earl Dapplelake had called in several other yard dogs, but not Alvis Massingill. Not a man who’d worked on ships both here and in the Solarian League. Not a man who probably had more wide-ranging experience with ship types and design than anyone else in the entire Star Kingdom.
At the time, he’d wondered why Cazenestro had ignored him. He still did. Maybe it was because his wife was CO of Casey-Rosewood, and they thought Parliament would assume Gill was too close to the RMN’s upper echelon to be a credible witness. Or maybe it was because he and Jean were immigrants from the League, and not Manticoran home-grown. He’d run into occasional prejudice among descendants of the First Settlers—most of it subtle, but definitely there. Maybe Parliament, with all its earls and countesses and barons, was more susceptible to that sort of bias.
But regardless of the reasons, the writing was on the wall. Both he and Jean had become disillusioned with the Navy.
Maybe it was time to move on.
The monitor beeped. “Gill,” he announced into his mike. “I’m starting to feel the torch at this end.”
“Acknowledged,” the foreman came back, again with the torch’s hiss in the background. “Let me know right away if the heat starts affecting the conduits.”
“Acknowledged,” Gill said.
Still, if there was one thing he’d learned in life it was that hasty decisions tended to be bad ones. He and Jean had secure positions here, and more importantly were accumulating benefits that would be lost if they left too soon. Another four or five years, and they should be able to get at least a partial retirement. That would be enough time to watch Parliament destroy Mars. Maybe enough time to watch them wreck their other battlecruisers, too, if that was the direction they decided to go.
Maybe even enough time to watch them destroy their entire Navy.
Only time would tell.
BOOK TWO
1532 PD
CHAPTER NINE
“You see it?” Spacer First Class Travis Long called down the curved service tube behind the U-shaped console that was the heart of HMS Vanguard’s gravitics data collection center. “Chief? You see it?”
“Patience, son, patience,” the lazy voice of Chief Gravitics Tech Randall Craddock drifted back. Craddock was only thirty-five T-years old, barely fifteen years older than Travis and less than ten years older than some of the other spacers and petty officers in his division. But he nevertheless insisted on calling all five of them son or kiddo anyway.
Spacer First Class Bonnie Esterle’s theory was that he was quoting from some space-going drama or comedy, something so obscure that none of the rest of them had ever heard of it. The more widespread consensus was that as Craddock’s hair went prematurely gray the brain beneath it was going prematurely senile.
Travis scowled as he looked at his chrono. Vanguard’s entire gravitic system had now been off-line for nearly thirteen minutes. Captain Davison’s standing orders were very specific: no ship’s sensor array was to be down for more than five minutes at a time.
Unfortunately, this was one of many situations where the violation couldn’t be helped. On paper, the massive battlecruiser had two independent sets of gravitic sensor electronics, either of which could operate the array and pull in and analyze data on distant gravitational fields. In hard cold reality, though, both sets were rarely functional at any given time.
In fact, more often than not, one of the duals was down because it was being raided for parts to keep the other one running.
The lack of proper readiness was bad enough. What made it all the more frustrating was that a casualty report was supposed to be filed by the Chief when any system was down for more than five minutes. Not only had Craddock never filed any such CASREP, as far as Travis could tell, but the Chief had studiously ignored Travis’s occasional gentle reminders of that regulation.
It wasn’t just Craddock, either. No one around Vanguard, either above or below the Chief, seemed to care about those clearly defined operational details.
Which was not only wrong, but dangerous as well. Vanguard was part of the ready reserve, and needed to be able to come to full action status in no more than ninety minutes. If Captain Davison didn’t know which of Vanguard’s systems were functional and which weren’t, how could he hope to bring the ship to action in an emergency?
“There it is,” Craddock called. “It’s a jump-burn, all right. Looks like we’re going to need two quads and a hex.”
Travis scowled some more. Terrific. “We’ve got a hex,” he called back, “but only one quad.”
“You sure?”
“Positive,” Travis said. “We used one on in the surge sump, remember?”
“No one told me that was our second to last,” Craddock grumbled. “Fine. Better get Gadgets on it. Here—catch.”
From around the curve of the tube a fist-sized chunk of electronics appeared. It bounced gently off the bulkhead, the impact sending it into a slow spin, then bounced again off the back of the nearest console. Two bounces later, it reached Travis. “Got it,” Travis said, plucking it out of the air.
“And hurry back with the other stuff,” Craddock ordered. “I can get started on the rest while she builds me a new quad.”
“Right.” Getting a grip on the nearest handhold, Travis gave himself a tug that sent him floating past the edge of the console bank and into the deserted monitor area itself. He caught hold of the back of one of the stations as he passed, giving himself more speed and a change of direction toward the open hatchway. He didn’t manage to hit the opening dead center, but he got through without brushing against the sides.
He was pretty sure he would never really enjoy maneuvering in the zero-gee that held sway everywhere aboard Vanguard except the rotating spin section amidships. But after almost three years aboard he was at least becoming reasonably competent at it.
Esterle and Gravitics Tech First Class Amber Bowen were waiting for him in the small machine/electronics shop that they shared with the electronic warfare and hydroponics divisions. Esterle was playing her usual game of drifting slowly in a vertical circle around her center of mass as she and Bowen chatted, a maneuver which nearly always induced her conversational partner to match the movement, usually unconsciously, in order to keep them facing each other in what would be a normal position if they’d been groundside or in the ship’s spin section. Sure enough, Bowen had matched Esterle’s rotation, though in Bowen’s case Travis had never been able to figure out whether she was unconsciously reacting to Esterle’s game or had figured it out and was simply bored enough to play it back at her.
Both women looked over as he came through the hatchway. “Let me guess,” Bowen said, waving toward the quad in Travis’s hand. “Chief wants a rebuild.”
“Chief wants, and we need,” Travis confirmed, grabbing a handhold and bringing himself to a stop beside them. He was nearly forty-five degrees off their shared vertical, and he had to resist the urge to realign himself to match them. “Number-two Doppler analyzer.”
“The Doppler’s out again?” Bowen growled, taking the quad and peering at it. “Great. This is one I’ve already patched.”
“You can do it, Ma’am,” Esterle said encouragingly.
“Thank you for your confidence, Spacer Esterle,” Bowen said dryly. She turned the quad over in her fingers, and then pushed off toward one of the work stations. “I’ll see what I can do. Chief need anything else?”
“Another quad and a hex,” Travis told her, giving himself a shove toward the wall of parts drawers.
“I think we’re out of hexes,” Bowen warned from behind him.
Travis wrinkled his nose. Yet another screw-up from the Logistics Department. Craddock, he knew, had requisitioned more hexes nearly six weeks ago. Clearly, they hadn’t arrived, and the Chief was not going to happy about that. “Great.”
“No, we’re okay—there are a couple left,” Esterle said. There was the soft slap of a hand on handhold, and she floated past him. “I’ll get it.”
Only instead of heading toward the relay/transfer section of the wall, she was aiming for the bin where the higher-voltage parts were kept. Frowning, Travis changed direction to follow.
Esterle was pulling open a drawer labeled Asymptotic Half-Link Routers when he caught up with her. “Since when do we store hexes in the A-hale drawer?” he asked.
“Since Atherton caught that little greaseball from hydroponics—his words, not mine—filching some of our equipment.”
“Atherton caught him in the act? Did he report him to the Bosun?”
“It wasn’t quite in the act,” Esterle hedged. “But he’s pretty sure it was him. Anyway, Atherton’s not likely to go to the Bosun anytime soon. Not after what happened the last time they chatted.”
Travis nodded. He didn’t know the details of that legendary conversation, but he did know that Spacer First Class Tully Atherton had emerged from it as Spacer Second Class Tully Atherton. “He still needs to report theft.”
“He has other ways of dealing with it.” Digging beneath the jumble of A-HLs, she pulled out a hex. “Here you go.”
“So is this one of ours, or one of theirs?” Travis asked, gingerly taking it.
“Well, it should be one of ours,” Esterle said. “A replacement for the one hydroponics made off with.”
“Assuming it was made off with.”
“Atherton keeps ridiculously close track of our stuff,” Esterle reminded him. “We’re definitely missing a few items.” She shrugged. “He just got them back, that’s all.”
“Right,” Travis murmured. Stealing parts was a serious offense, and Vanguard’s Bosun, Master Chief Dovnar, had made it abundantly clear what he would do to anyone he caught doing that.
But Atherton hadn’t exactly stolen anything. The hidden hex was still officially in the shop, where anyone could theoretically find and use it. The fact that no one would look for it in an A-HL drawer was mostly beside the point.
“You going to report him?” Esterle asked quietly.
Travis started. He hadn’t realized his mental conflict had been so visible. “He’s sure someone from hydroponics took our stuff?”
“Yes,” Esterle said. “Why? Does that make a difference?”
Travis pursed his lips. It didn’t, really. Or at least it shouldn’t.
But hydroponics wasn’t exactly a critical part of Vanguard’s official war footing. Not when the ship was parked in permanent high orbit over Manticore, with fresh fruit and vegetables just a shuttle trip away.
The gravitics division, on the other hand, was vital. They maintained the sensors that could spot the telltale hyper footprint whenever a ship entered Manticoran space, as well as being the long-range detectors that could track and identify ships already moving through the system.
Besides, parts did get misfiled on occasion. In fact, they got misfiled all the time.
He felt his stomach tighten. Reasonable, logical…and one hundred percent rationalization.
“I won’t report him,” he told Esterle. “But he needs to put everything back where it’s supposed to be.”
She was silent a moment. “Okay,” she said at last. “No problem. I’ll tell him.”
Which, Travis was pretty sure, really meant she would tell Atherton to make sure Rule-Stickler Travesty Long didn’t find out about any future attempts to make sure their equipment didn’t develop legs.
So what was Travis accomplishing by trying to stick to the regs?
“If you really feel like filing complaints today, you might consider the com division,” Esterle suggested as she shoved off the drawers and headed toward the cable bin. “There’s supposed to be a line between here and the monitor station so that you can call for parts or tools instead of having to scamper back personally every time the Chief needs something.”
“I know,” Travis said. “I’ve already filed one.”
She blinked a frown at him as she stopped in front of a co-ax bin. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Travis assured her.
“Good for you.” She rummaged beneath one of the neat coils of cable and pulled out a hidden quad. “So what happened?”
“About what you’d expect,” Travis said, taking the quad from her. “Com agreed it was their line, but said it was running along our bulkhead and through aft fire control’s junction box, so that made it either our problem or AFC’s.”
“And AFC of course said it was ours?”
“And Chief Craddock said it was theirs.” Travis turned back to Bowen. “How does it look?”
“Don’t know yet,” Bowen said. She had the hex partially disassembled, with the pieces neatly lined up on one of the tac strips beside the tool rack. “I’ll know one way or another in half an hour.”
“You might as well head back,” Esterle said. “Leave the Chief alone too long and he’s likely to fall asleep. Embarrassing if some officer got lost and happened to wander by.”
“Like that’s going to happen,” Bowen added. “Go on, Long. I’ll have Esterle deliver if I get it working.”
* * *
Twenty-five minutes later, as Craddock and Travis were running their check on the other newly-installed components, Esterle arrived with the hex in her hand and a self-satisfied look on her face. Craddock took it with a grunted thanks and headed back into the crawlspace.
“I told you she could fix it,” Esterle said, peering down the passageway after the Chief. “Anything else I can do while I’m here?”
Travis peered into the crawlspace, making sure Esterle couldn’t see his face and this newest moral dilemma.
Yes, Esterle had assured them Bowen could rebuild the hex. The problem was that the hex she’d just handed him wasn’t the same one he’d given Bowen. The other had had a scratch on the casing where a screwdriver had missed its mark. This one didn’t have that scratch.
Probably it was just another of Atherton’s private stash. But if it wasn’t…
Travis exhaled slowly. He had no proof, he reminded himself firmly, or even a solid hint that anything illegal had happened. Hexes were probably the most common single component present in Vanguard’s electronics, used everywhere from the automatic cooking systems in the galley to the cryogenic cooling system for the battlecruiser’s heavy axial laser. And while regulations frowned on different divisions swapping parts and equipment, it wasn’t considered an actionable offense.
“Long?” Esterle prompted. “Wake up, buddy. You need anything else?”
“No,” Travis said. “You can head back. We’re fine.”
* * *
“We are gathered here today,” Breakwater intoned toward the cameras, “to inaugurate the latest addition to the Manticoran Patrol and Rescue service, and to celebrate a new era in the ongoing saga that truly is the Star Kingdom of Manticore.”
Floating at the far end of the group crowded into the bridge of the brand-new sloop HMS Phobos, positioned as far from the cameras as it was possible to be, Winterfall gripped the handhold beside him, trying to look as serious, noble, and historical as everyone else.
Trying with even more fervor not to throw up.
He’d done some research on the whole zero-gee thing in the two days since Breakwater had announced that Phobos was finally ready and informed Winterfall that he would be joining the rest of the Committee for the commissioning ceremony. He’d read about the effects of free-fall, both physiological and psychological, and had assumed he was adequately prepared.
He hadn’t been. Not even close.
He clenched his teeth, silently telling his stomach and inner ear that he was not, in fact, falling helplessly to his death, but was hundreds of kilometers above Manticore and as safe as if he was in his own home.
His inner ear didn’t believe him. His stomach certainly didn’t.
Across the bridge, Breakwater was still droning on about Phobos and the new era the sloop was ushering in for MPARS and how much safer the Star Kingdom’s citizens were now. After the Exchequer would come Defense Minister Dapplelake, and First Lord Cazenestro would probably have a few words to say, as well.
