by David Weber
If they returned.
In many ways, this was worse than even the invasion of Manticore. There, they’d had barely hours to realize what was happening, and all of that time had been filled with frantic work as every ship in the Navy scrambled to get combat ready.
Here, they were going to have days to handle all that prep work. Days which would give everyone aboard plenty of time to lie in their racks thinking about what lay ahead.
Their training was supposed to have prepared them for this kind of situation. But as Lisa looked back now, she realized it hadn’t prepared them nearly well enough.
But then, probably no training really could.
“So let’s forget about potential problems with our allies and focus our attention on the definite problems with our opponents,” Marcello continued. “We have seven days to make sure everything and everybody is ready for whatever’s coming at us. I trust you’ve made that point to Ravel?”
“Yes, Sir, I have,” Lisa assured him. “Not that she needed the reminder. She’s been elbow-deep in analysis, simulations, and layered plans since we got the news.”
And she was a competent enough TO, Lisa knew. Still, she didn’t seem to have that spark of outside-the box-thinking Travis did.
She wished Travis was here. Not just because his way of thinking could prove crucial in the battle ahead, but because she missed him.
“And we’ve received Commodore Charnay’s proposed drill schedule?”
“Yes, Sir, his operations officer sent it over,” Lisa said again. “Not that I’ve shared that schedule with anyone yet.”
“Are you planning to?”
“Actually, Sir—with your permission, of course—no.”
“Good,” Marcello said. “Though I trust you realize that if our people flub our very first joint exercise with the rest of the squadron, it’s not going to look good.”
“I discussed that with Commander Laforge,” Lisa said. “I told her what I had in mind, and she grabbed it and ran.”
“She’s not going to tell their people the schedule, either?”
“Exactly,” Lisa said. “So if there’s any flubbing, it’ll probably be pretty broadly shared.”
“Good enough,” Marcello said. “Just be aware that if Ravel and her people turn in a subpar performance, they’ll pay for it in more work and less sleep.”
“Understood, Sir,” Lisa said. “The last thing we want is to hit Danak without everyone running at peak performance.”
Marcello gave a little snort. “Remember the old days, Commander? The days when we ran drills and exercises with plenty of advance warning?”
“You mean the old days a year ago?”
“Those are the ones.”
Lisa nodded. Those had indeed been slower, lazier, more comfortable times.
Part of that had been from necessity, as recalcitrant or downright broken ship systems needed to be babied into something approaching readiness. But another part of it had been the “old pals” network in action, making sure the officers involved had as much time as possible to bring their departments up to snuff. Career-essential efficiency reports had ridden on how well they performed, after all, and it would never have done to have someone blot his or her copybook simply because they hadn’t had a couple of weeks to get ready.
But those days were gone forever. The Star Kingdom had been attacked, and the RMN would never again be simply a comfortable place to tread water and drift along until an equally comfortable retirement.
When the old days faded, the old habits and systems had to fade with them.
“Still, sic transit gloria mundi, as the saying goes,” Marcello continued. He raised his eyebrows. “You were planning to share the schedule with me, weren’t you?”
“Of course, Sir,” Lisa said in her most respectfully innocent voice. “How could you possibly think otherwise?”
* * *
“You realize, of course,” Joshua Miller warned, “that on its basic, fundamental level this document is largely worthless as a lever.”
“True,” Elizabeth conceded. “And if he chooses to play it on that level, it will make a messy situation that much worse.”
“Breakwater won’t fight,” Michael said from across the table. “He understands reality, but he also understands the intangibles of appearance. He’ll do what you want, Elizabeth, if only to preserve his reputation for future options.”
Elizabeth felt her throat tighten. He’ll do what you want. Not what the former king wanted, or what a prominent member of the Commons wanted, or even what all three of them wanted together. What you want.
It had been over a year since Elizabeth had been crowned Queen. In all that time, there’d been maybe half a dozen brief periods when she’d actually felt like a true sovereign.
Now, with that single word, the full impact of her title, position, power, and responsibility suddenly hit her.
“I hope you’re right, Your Highness,” Miller said, inclining his head toward Michael. “I suppose only time will tell.” He paused. “But whatever happens, Your Majesty,” he added to Elizabeth, his voice going almost shy, “I want to thank you for allowing me to be part of it.”
“You’re quite welcome, Mr. Miller,” Elizabeth assured him. “For my part, I’ll forever be in your debt for the service you’ve provided to the Crown, to the Star Kingdom, and to me personally.”
“It was a duty I was more than happy to perform.” Miller’s shoulder shifted, as if he wanted to reach over and touch her hand. Not in a forward or inappropriate manner, Elizabeth sensed, but merely a friendly, companion-like touch.
But at the last second, he seemed to sense it would be inappropriate or unwelcome. The shoulder shifted back, and his hand remained where it was.
And so, since Elizabeth was likewise feeling a sudden yearning for human contact, she took the initiative, reaching over to touch his hand.
Miller seemed to stiffen, just slightly. Across the table, Elizabeth sensed her father stir, as if about to speak, then go still again.
She withdrew her hand. “You’d best go, now,” she said. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
“Indeed, Your Majesty,” Miller said, standing up and bowing to her. “Just let me know when you need me. I’ll be ready.” He swiveled around, bowed to Michael. “Your Highness.”
“Mr. Miller,” Michael said gravely.
Miller turned and headed across the study toward the door, where Sergeant Adler waited to escort him home.
Elizabeth watched his back as he walked. In another time, in another place…
She shook the thought away. Or rather, the thought faded of its own accord. As long as Carmichael’s memory danced through her mind and heart and soul, there could never be another man allowed to take the empty place at her side.
It was almost funny, in a crudely ironic sort of way, how everyone had thought Burgundy’s final data file had been a list of potential suiters. She’d thought that, the Prime Minister’s own secretary had apparently thought it, and whoever had leaked the names to Breakwater had clearly thought it.
Maybe that list would have come next, had the Prime Minister lived a few more weeks. What everyone had clearly forgotten was that Burgundy was a servant of the Crown as well as a close friend to the Wintons. He’d seen the coming fight over succession as clearly as Breakwater had.
And so had left his Queen his final legacy.
Across the office, Miller and Adler slipped out into the empty corridor, Adler closing the door behind them. “He’s a good man,” Michael murmured. His tone, Elizabeth noted, gave no hint as to which of the two possible implications her father might be going for with the words.
“Yes, he is,” Elizabeth agreed. For a moment she was tempted to tease the double meaning back at him, just for the fun of it. But she was Queen, and fun was no longer something she could engage in spontaneously. It was, instead, a precious commodity to be carefully saved for specific times and places. “He’ll make a good ally in the Common
s.”
Again, she sensed her father’s shift in posture, though whether in relief or disappointment she couldn’t tell. “And the others?”
“Jacques Corlain will certainly stand alongside Mr. Miller,” Elizabeth said. “Placido Amadeo—”
“You really can call him Joshua, you know,” Michael pointed out gently. “At least when we’re alone. It’s quite obvious you like the man.”
“Placido Amadeo and his company have a great deal of influence on several of the other MPs,” Elizabeth continued doggedly. “I’m confident that he’ll also answer Mr. Miller’s request to use that pressure when needed. All in all, I think we’ve got a good chance.”
Her father gave a barely-audible sigh.
“I agree,” he said. “Though if Breakwater doesn’t—but of course he will,” he corrected himself hastily. “And now, I believe it’s time to put these old bones to bed. Unless you need me some more tonight?”
“I’ll always need you, Dad,” Elizabeth said, reaching across the table and squeezing his hand. “But for now, pleasant dreams.”
“You won’t always need me, Elizabeth,” Michael said. He squeezed her hand in turn, then let go and stood up. “In fact, I’m not sure you need me right now. And I’m glad of that. Very glad.” He smiled. “But if you don’t need me, I hope you’ll always want me.”
“Always, Dad,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Sleep well, and be sure to kiss Mom for me.”
“She’s probably already asleep.”
“Then just kiss her very, very gently.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Between the time required to chase Hamman from Lau Hiler to Sachsen and the flight time from there back to Walther, thirty-nine T-days would elapse by the time Casey returned to the Volsungs’ home system. With no idea of the mercenaries’ operational patterns, it was impossible to predict whether or not some—or all—of the rest of their vessels would have returned in the cruiser’s absence.
That thought continued to nag at the back of Travis’ mind. Still, Clegg, Basaltberg, and Kane—Riefenstahl, rather—didn’t seem particularly concerned about it. They continued to plan, and to hold frequent conferences, as the Allied force headed back to Walther.
Or at least, they weren’t showing any particular concern. Which was not, of course, the same thing.
Still, Travis could sense a certain oddness about the Andermani and their attitude towards Gensonne. It was an attitude Chomps had also picked up on, and the two of them discussed it on several occasions over a beer in Travis’s quarters.
They never found a conclusion to safely land on, but both agreed that Basaltberg was being driven by more than just a desire to deal with a potential threat to their empire’s security.
Still, if the Andermani were reticent about exactly what Gensonne might have done to awaken such ire, they’d been far more forthcoming about their navy and its capabilities than Travis had anticipated. It was eye-opening, and more than a little astonishing.
Unexpectedly, at least to Travis, it was also a little humiliating.
The Andermani were sharing information and advice so enthusiastically because the Royal Manticoran Navy wasn’t remotely in their league. Even Casey, the most modern ship in the RMN, was simply outclassed.
In a purely technological sense, Casey was in at least shouting distance of her new consorts. But she was the RMN’s outlier, the only ship they had which could make that claim. Basaltberg’s ships all mounted equally—uniformly—modern weapon systems and electronics.
Yet, in many ways, the Star Kingdom’s Navy’s technological inferiority might very well be its least glaring weakness. The far more serious detriment was that the RMN lacked the Andermani’s institutional knowledge, their infrastructure, their technology, and—most damning of all—their experience.
The Andermani hadn’t drawn attention to it, of course. They’d accepted Travis’ and Clegg’s proposal for dealing with the mercenary base’s missile platforms, and had been highly complementary about Casey’s role in the Battle of Manticore. Yet below the surface Travis could sense that they also thought the RMN had won that battle as much by sheer luck as by actual military skill. None of them seemed to question the Manticorans’ courage and determination, but he’d had the distinct impression that they’d found it hard not to roll their eyes during discussions of both participants’ tactics during the battle.
As Casey’s tactical officer, Travis had been deeply involved in the planning sessions carried out en route back to Walther. Many of those had been com conferences, but at Basaltberg’s insistence he and Clegg had dined several times on Vergeltung as the admiral’s honored guests. Technically, those dinners had been social occasions, but there’d been quite a bit of professional conversation as well. Somewhere along the way, Travis had realized that Basaltberg, Riefenstahl, and Captain Luitpold Huschens, Vergeltung’s captain and Admiral Basaltberg’s flag captain, were quietly conducting a seminar for the benefit of the Manticorans.
Travis had no problem with that. On the contrary, he had determined to soak up any insight they offered like an eager sponge. It was harder to tell about Clegg, though he noted that when she offered a response or a comment it was always succinct, to the point, and thoughtful. Clearly, she was as aware as he was of just how much the RMN still had to learn.
But she’d also been a King’s—and now a Queen’s—officer a lot longer than Travis had. She’d been one of the people who’d fought for decades to simply keep the Navy alive. Having to now face the evidence of what the RMN could have been, and had never been allowed to be, had to be harder on her than it was even on Travis.
Vergeltung was a perfect case in point.
The battleship was far newer than the RMN’s battlecruisers. No one, even in the Solarian League, had been building ships this big when Manticore purchased the Lexington-class battlecruisers nearly a T-century ago.
But Travis knew a refitted ship when he saw one. In fact, he suspected that Vergeltung hadn’t been refitted so much as rebuilt. There were clear signs of heavy damage, including both external and internal stiffening plates, the kind used to relieve stress on hull frames and decking after significant breakage.
After that kind of damage a hull seldom survived. The repair costs had probably been close to the purchase price of a newer ship of the same class. Gustav Anderman must have wanted her badly to invest that much in putting her back together again.
But however old the basic hull was, and however severely it might have been mauled in the past, Travis had no doubt of its soundness and integrity. And there was nothing at all old, obsolete, or worn out about Vergeltung.
Her electronics were cutting edge. He hadn’t personally examined her missiles, but they were listed as Starstorms, the same round the SLN had used as recently as twelve T-years ago. The fusion boosters that kicked those missiles out of their tubes were at least twice as powerful as those aboard Manticoran ships, allowing the weapons to get safely clear of the wedge and on their way correspondingly faster. Her single spinal laser was a massive weapon, again at least twice as powerful as anything the RMN mounted. She was lavishly equipped with active anti-missile defenses, including heavy autocannon, advanced defensive electronic warfare suites, and a towed decoy system that would make any tactical officer’s mouth water. The improvised Allied squadron exercised together a half-dozen times during the voyage from Sachsen back to Walther, and even in the exercises it had been painfully obvious that Vergeltung’s ECM were far more advanced than Casey’s, even after her refit, far less the rest of the RMN’s units.
Basaltberg’s other ships presented much the same picture. Though not all of them were new, they’d all been carefully maintained and upgraded on a regular basis by a navy which understood the advantages of operational homogeneity and believed in keeping its ships ahead of anything they were likely to encounter.
Travis could only wish some of the people responsible for Manticoran naval priorities could see what he was seeing, and from Clegg’s dark
moods after their visits to Vergeltung he guessed she had the same thoughts. She’d been watching the Navy—her Navy—slowly fall apart, disintegrate into a hollowed out shell, for a lot longer than he had.
And now, she was about to take the least hollow ship of that shell into battle.
* * *
All the way back from Sachsen Travis had had the nagging fear that the Andermani might have been putting too much trust in the data he and Chomps had picked up during their flyby of the Volsungs’ base.
Now, sitting in n-space ten light-minutes outside the Walther hyper limit, on the farthest side of the system from Walther Prime, he found out why Basaltberg hadn’t been worried.
“I have got to get me one of those,” Chomps muttered as he, Travis, and a dozen other Manticorans gazed at the viewscreen and the vac-suited Andermani techs working on Vergeltung’s hull. Travis hadn’t gotten a good look at this bit of SMS tech during the trip, and he rather doubted they were going to get one now.
“I wonder how they crammed everything in,” Chomps continued, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “It can’t be more than half again the size of a standard shuttle.”
Travis nodded. Only a shuttle and a half; and yet somehow the Andermani had crammed in a sensor suite far better than the one Casey’s techs had rigged up.
And had even had room for a set of impellers.
It had to be Solarian tech. Somehow, even way out in the Andermani Empire, Gustav must still have a pipeline back there that enabled him to get hold of this kind of cutting-edge equipment.
Did that mean that the Solarians also had these recon drones? Probably.
All that mattered at the moment, though, was that Vergeltung had one of them.
Such marvels came with a cost, of course. The drone was big enough that the battleship had been required to give up a missile launcher site in order to provide a hull mooring point for it. In the missing tube’s place was a housing which—intentionally, no doubt—closely mimicked the weapon mount which had been removed. The housing was more than just camouflage, though, almost certainly providing an atmosphere seal and allowing a shirtsleeve environment for the drone’s maintenance.
