“So you’re sitting in the operations room, running the battle.”
“Hell no! One squadron? What’s there to run? Mendez can handle it. I’m flying the Specter again, with Tanaka’s friends along for the ride. And a few others who scored high on the range in Basic. Apparently the Zemlyan force has a cadre of Marines along for the ride, but the Captain wants us to take a part in the raid.”
“And how long did it take to convince her of that, Lieutenant?” Looking at the new rank insignia, he said, “Commander. Sorry. Didn’t notice.”
“Don’t worry about it. I reckon they’re promoting just about anyone these days. And it didn’t take much persuading. She wants Romano back, just like me.” Dunking his chopsticks into the steaming noddles, he said, “And that’s why you’re here, of course.”
“I’m riding shotgun again,” McBride said, matter-of-factly. “Just want to know what time to report to the flight deck.”
“Ten minutes before battle stations ought to be enough, and make sure you check an assault rifle out of the armory,” Flynn said. “If you’ve got a chance to spend a little time on the range, that might not be a bad idea, though I’m rather hoping things go more smoothly than that.”
“No protests, arguments?”
“Would there be any point in that?” Flynn replied, taking a second drink from the bottle. “You know, this stuff actually grows on you after a while. How long have they been running their still?”
“Three years at least,” McBride replied. “That’s Captain Forrest again. The crew needs a safety valve, and if it’s an experienced gang making this crap, it probably won’t make anyone go blind. Sickbay gets a bottle left outside its door once every month or so for testing, and they’re pretty good about making changes if necessary. I was on Lexington once, when they had that crackdown. Bad business. Twenty pilots in sickbay for alcohol poisoning because some moron thought the potato wine needed an extra kick. Guy’s probably still in Leavenworth, even with the time difference.”
“That took down a friend of mine,” Flynn said. “He had to leave the service. Never did get back all his sight. Last time I spoke to him, he was setting up a bar on Luna City. Had plans to open it up, turn it into a nightclub.” He paused, his eyes distant for a moment, and continued, “I wonder if he ever did.”
“We’ll never know, I guess,” McBride said. “Not that it matters, does it? They lived, they died, and that’s what they would have done anyway. Nothing we can do about it. Probably nothing you’d have done about it anyway.” He took a deep drink, and said, “As for me, I’m well into my twenty years, and I figure I’ll probably end up adding a few more on top when this is done. What about you?”
“I had a year to go. I was going to quit, maybe go back home, go to law school.”
“Last thing the universe needs is another lawyer, Commander,” McBride said with a smile. “Where was home, anyway?”
“DeGarde, Louisiana. It’s a nothing town, but I guess it was home, and I always figured I’d go back there someday. All of this was meant to be an adventure, something to tick through my twenties.” He sighed, then added, “I was going to get married there, next...” Shaking his head, he said, “What am I saying. It was hundreds of years ago. She broke up with me, anyway. Just before the battle, actually. Ran off with an insurance salesman.”
“Maybe she knew something you didn’t. Good you got the letter before the battle, though. Reckon it must have helped.” He looked up at the clock, then said, “I saw that firefight. Had a great view on my turret sensors. Looked like one hell of a battle.”
“It was,” Flynn said.
“Your first?”
“Six years, and somehow I never figured I’d end up actually fighting. We’d trained for it, prepared for it, but that wasn’t the same thing.” He sighed, and said, “You’re luckier than me, John. You’ve still got your shipmates. I don’t.”
“Mendez and the others...”
“Mendez and I don’t get on, in case you haven’t noticed. I don’t have to like her to work with her. She’s a good pilot, a good leader, but we’re not exactly friends, and the others had only been on board for a few weeks. Just because some headquarters genius decided to stick us with a mountain of rookies for the exercise. And the squadron here...” Holding up a datapad, he said, “Ensign Price, terminated from flight school for picking a fight with an instructor in a bar.”
McBride chuckled, and said, “I suppose he isn’t the first.”
“No, but doing it in front of four off-duty military policemen is just dumb. I’m astonished he got to stay in the service at all.”
“His father,” McBride replied, “was Senator Price. Senior Senator from Samoa. Daddy got him into the Academy, Daddy got him into Flight School, and I guess Daddy managed to work the court-martial as well. Be interesting to see how he performs on his own.”
“Acting Ensign McPherson,” Flynn said, reading from the roster. “Formerly a Ship’s Serviceman Third. One moment he’s selling candy bars at the commissary, and the next moment he’s sitting at the controls of a fighter.” He looked up, smiled, and said, “Sorry.”
“Get it out of your system. That’s one reason I came down. I thought you might need someone to talk to, and this is a lot more fun than hanging around the enlisted mess at the moment. Preacher’s up there giving a speech, and they’re just eating up every word. What you call a psychiatric patch job. I think Todd’s suicide hit them all pretty hard. Maybe hard enough to convince a few others not to go ahead for a while.”
“We get this battle wrong, they’ll get their wish.”
“My Dad served in the fleet, during the Four Stars War. He always said that there was nothing better than a nice neat victory for morale.”
“Was he a Fire Controlman, as well?”
“Chief Ship’s Serviceman on Tom Jefferson, actually,” he replied, as Flynn’s face reddened. “Relax, he used to make fun of it as well. Ended up running a 7-Eleven in Chicago.”
“Second-generation, then.”
“Third. My grandmother was a Quartermaster. You?”
Shaking his head, he replied, “First to serve. My folks didn’t really approve of the military.” He paused, then said, “At least they were already gone. Some kid who managed to short out the autonav on his father’s vintage car. Took them both out together, and apparently, they didn’t know a thing about it.” He looked down at the reports, and said, “None of this seems real to me, not yet, and I don’t think it will for a while. I figured I might get the half-bar if I stayed in, but I’d figured I’d probably end up retiring a Lieutenant. I wasn’t even going to stay in the Reserve. I never even got to command a squadron. The Captain pushed me all the way up to Wing, and I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing.”
“Little secret, Commander. None of us do. We just get through it, a day at a time.”
“They teach you that in Controlman’s School?”
“My first Chief taught me that. The hard way. My first battle drill, I’d damn near humped the rulebook, we were that close. First time something went wrong, I froze. She took me into her office, tore several strips off me, then showed me footage of her first battle drill, where she’d done the same damned thing.” He looked at the operations board again, and said, “Training officer, duty Admin officer? I thought the Wing Commander was supposed to have the good jobs.”
“Yeah, I’ve served under a lot of officers like that. I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t ever be one of them. A promise that I mean to keep.”
Shaking his head, McBride said, “Let me get this straight. An officer who listens to his senior enlisted, actually believes in all that stuff about the responsibility of command, and is smart enough to realize that the most important thing to do on a new duty station is get on the right side of the CMC. How come you aren’t a five-star Admiral?”
“I think y
ou answered your own question.”
With a chuckle, McBride replied, “Yeah, guess so.”
“What about the rest of the officers?”
“Singh’s fine. A good organizer, good administrator, and the sort of guy you definitely do not want to face across the poker table, if you know what I mean.” Taking another bite of noodles, the sauce dripping down his chin, he continued, “Fox is sharp as hell. She’d probably have had a ship of her own within a few years. Gonzalez, well, you really don’t want to play poker with him, but that’s because he’d draw five aces from the deck, and somehow convince you that it was quite normal.”
“I haven’t met him yet.”
“The man lurks down in the storage bays, like a spider in his web, waiting to strike. And plays pretty mean racquetball. Ship’s champion. Nobody around here can touch him. Brooks is good, but a bit young, and then we get to the glorious Commander Kirkland.”
“What’s her story?” he asked. “She always seems about three steps behind.”
“She was Admiral Crawford’s aide.”
“And she went from that to Operations Officer on a Carrier? What happened?”
With a gleaming smile, McBride said, “Remember, we’re a Small-Ship Transport.”
“He got married again. To a woman thirty years his junior. Kirkland was transferred out the very next day. You connect the dots.” Taking another swig of his drink, he added, “That’s this ship, Commander. We’re a dumping ground. A place where careers go to die. It’s not so bad for the snipes, the gun crews. Pretty good for us, actually. For an officer...”
“I think all that changed yesterday,” Flynn replied. He looked around his office, and said, “I looked up the records of this ship’s former Wing Commanders. Hell of a record this ship has.”
“Yeah. She deserved a damn sight better than to end up as a glorified freighter. There was a rumor flying around that they were going to take her out of active duty altogether. Turn her into a fixed orbital station, like they did with the Tom Jefferson.”
Flynn scooped up the last few noodles, easily tidying them into his mouth, and wiped his lips with a scrap of tissue before pushing the containers into the waste chute. He looked at the bottle again, little evidence that he had drunk from it, and frowned.
“What percent is this stuff?”
“Seven, eight. Something like that. It varies.” Rising to his feet, McBride rummaged in the bag for a bottle, popping a pair of pills into his mouth and swallowing them dry before tossing him the container. “Guaranteed to get you back on your feet in no time at all.”
“Thanks,” Flynn said, taking them with a last sip of the orange liquid before resealing the top and sliding it into a drawer. “I’ll hold onto that for the after-action party.” He looked up at the clock, and said, “Ninety-nine minutes. I hate this part. I’d rather be sitting in the cockpit.”
“Want to head down there?”
Shaking his head, he said, “It’d just make the rest of the squadron nervous. They’ve got enough problems already without me adding to them.” He glanced down at a datapad, the hastily prepared battle plan running through a simulated sequence, and said, “If anyone back home could see us, there’d be court-martial boards for everyone. They spent weeks preparing for those exercises, working out every damned detail. We’ve through all this together so damned fast...”
“I think that’s what happens in war,” McBride replied. “So Pop always told me, anyway. Though I’m not sure how much use I can make of his advice.”
“What was that?”
“Always make the coffee extra strong when the pulsar bolts are flying, and make sure you have the spare uniform pants at the front.” Flynn’s laughter echoed down the corridor, scaring a nervous technician who scurried away as the two of them walked towards the elevator. “Want to head up to the range?”
“Sure. Tell you what. Winner gets to fly the ship.”
“That’s crazy,” McBride said, dodging through the doors. “You’d be putting the best marksman at the helm and the pilot at the guns.”
“What makes you think you’re a better shot?”
“I’m a fire controlman, remember? This is kinda what I do.”
“Unless you’ve got proton cannons on the range, I think you might be in for a surprise.”
Chapter 17
Romano led the way along the tunnels, the air growing increasingly stale as they picked their way through the passages, Kuznetzov warily looking around, watching their rear. He froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps, somewhere up above them, and turned to the escaped prisoner, frustration on his face.
“I thought you said they never came down this far,” he said.
“They never have,” Kuznetzov replied. “Just once, to check the reservoir on the upper level, but they’re at least two levels below that now.” Looking around, he said, “You think they might have detectors down here?”
“If they did, we’d be dead already,” Romano replied, coldly. “That’s a standard search pattern, but it means that we’re stuck down here. They’ll have all the paths back to the dome marked. And I think they’ll have brought something more effective than these stun rods.” Tapping the wall, he said, “Toughened alloy and bare rock. You could fire a machine gun at this all day long and not break through.”
“There’s another level, down that way,” Kuznetzov said, his breath increasingly labored. “I’ve never made it down this far before. I’m not sure we should be down here now.”
“Keep moving slowly and steadily,” Romano said. “No sudden moves, no major exertion.” He walked to the end of the corridor, pulling open the hatch to the emergency shaft, the metal cold in his hand, cold enough to freeze his fingers. An angry whine echoed around the corridor as the frozen hinges ground open, and he swung onto the ladder, carefully making his way down, testing every rung as he went.
“They really built this place to last,” Kuznetzov said, looking around. “I found ration packs dated as late as 2160. The early days of the Terrestrial Federation. There must have been people here for a long time.”
“If Enkidu is as rich in gadolinium as you say, I can understand why,” Romano replied. “I’m surprised a colony didn’t survive here.”
Shaking his head, the prisoner replied, “It might have, but when the Federation collapsed, any world that wasn’t truly self-sufficient died. Either the people managed to get to somewhere with better prospects in time, or they all died out when the supplies ran dry. There are worlds out there populated only by the dead, dozens of them.” He sighed, and said, “The Guild has maybe six, seven worlds under its control. I know of about as many free planets, some of them more advanced than others, but at its height, the Federation had nine hundred and thirty-two member worlds. Spread across hundreds of light-years.”
“Way more than my day,” Romano said. “We had half a dozen settlements, and we hadn’t explored more than forty light-years from Earth.” He swung down to corridor below, and read, “Command Level. This is it. End of the line.”
“You think there might be something down here?”
“Possibly. Depends where they decided to put their critical stores. I didn’t see any signs of an armory on any of the levels we’ve passed through, and I guess the Guilders would have stripped anything they could make use of.” Looking at the dust on the floor, he added, “Nobody’s been down here for centuries. That much I know.”
Looking ruefully at the footprint he’d made, Kuznetzov said, “If anyone comes after us...”
“Then we’re as good as dead, but I’ve been working on that basis since we got away.” He walked down the corridor, pausing to look at an engraved plate on the wall.
“What’s that?”
“Memorial. Listing the servicemen who died here.” Scanning the list, he said, “Eighty-one names. There must have been some pretty major battl
es fought here.”
“Anyone you know?” Romano ran his hand across the plate, knocking the dust free, and stared at the first name on the list, his eyes vacant, distant. Kuznetzov looked up at the list, and asked, “Lieutenant? What’s wrong?”
“Lieutenant Commander Anthony Romano. Died August 9th, 2124.” He looked at the other man, and said, “My brother. He’d just been accepted to the Academy. I’d hoped to be back on Earth in time for his send-off.” Looking at the date again, he said, “Promoted so fast?”
“Probably the War,” Kuznetzov said. “I don’t know as much about it as I should, but the last phase of the Formation Wars lasted for twenty years. There weren’t really any winners. Every economy was shattered, millions dead. I don’t think they ever even signed a peace treaty. The Unificationists manage to drag Earth’s governments together. Even then, the recovery took decades, but it led to the greatest government that humanity ever knew.” Kicking at the wall, he added, “All we have now are the tattered remnants of everything they once had. It all fell apart so quickly after Earth was destroyed.”
“I knew he was dead,” Romano said, shaking his head. “He had to be, of course. It was all over centuries ago. I can understand that intellectually, but this makes it look so damn fresh.” Taking a deep breath, he said, “There’s no record of how he died, but it must have been in battle, or he wouldn’t be up on the wall.”
“There might be records down here somewhere, Lieutenant,” Kuznetzov said. “Does it matter? As you said, it all happened centuries ago. At least you can know that he died well.”
“But that’s all I know,” Romano protested. “Did he have kids? What about my parents? What happened to them?” He looked across at Kuznetzov, and replied, “I’m never going to know, am I? It’s always going to be blank.”
Shall Not Perish (Lincoln's War Book 1) Page 14
