Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  To David’s surprise Alan Shipley closely resembled Admiral Carlson -- his right hand was missing. When he saluted Commodore Cross left-handed, he joked about it, something Evan Carlson had never done in David’s hearing. “There I was, with a Portie ‘expert’ in life support. He reached up to bleed a liquid nitrogen dewar; I tried to push him out of the way, but he undid the check screw right in front of himself. I just got splashed on the hand -- he took nearly the full dewar in the face.”

  David felt ill. Yeah, being vaporized instantly was probably no fun. Having your head frozen solid was, undoubtedly, as far from fun as you could get.

  He listened intently as Commodore Cross explained the “training” exercise.

  “That’s a good idea, Commodore. We haven’t exercised nearly enough. We need to get additional weapon platforms up.”

  “We’ve suggested mounting some blues on stripped cargo ships,” the commodore told him.

  To David’s surprise, the man bowed to David. “Ah, a fresh viewpoint! Dranga is a good man, but cautious, and, since the war started, afraid of being vaporized. He hasn’t quite realized yet that it would be worse for his career if he survived and didn’t get vaporized. He is going to lose the planet.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Commodore Cross told him. “Others have survived with a lot less.”

  Commander Shipley laughed. “Run the curve -- attackers versus defenders. You want to win here? Send half the ships elsewhere, and if the enemy attack isn’t at least twice as strong as your force, send three quarters of the rest home.”

  “What do you mean?” the commodore asked.

  “I mean, if you look at the record, the worse the odds against the defenders are, the better we do. Tannenbaum -- one ship defends against five. Two aliens are destroyed, one chases after one of our ships and the other two flee.

  “New Helgoland -- seven ships defending against six attackers. Right off the bat, the bad guys change the odds to five to four in their favor. Then the weakest ship in the Fleet engages and suddenly they have only one survivor who flees. We still lose one more ship.

  “I could go on.”

  “Commander Zinder joined Starfarer’s Dream’s company after New Helgoland.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” David said defensively.

  “Useless as tits on a boar,” Commodore Shipley agreed. “But good company to keep. And now you wash up here! I hope a little of that luck rubbed off on you and will now rub off on the rest of us!”

  Fleet Command had had all sorts of leadership tests, but none involving plotting mutiny or questioning the authority of an admiral. David contemplated just holding his tongue, but decided that it was an innocuous question.

  “Commodore Shipley, Commodore Cross told me that Admiral Stepanowski’s first name is Josef. Yet you call him ‘Dranga,’ sir.”

  Commodore Cross laughed and had a grin.

  Commodore Shipley shrugged. “I was Admiral Stepanowski’s roommate when we were at the Rim Academy at Fleet World. He was direct from Earth; he’d never been in space before. You have to understand what life in Europe has been like since the middle of the Twenty-first Century, Commander. Their population crashed, and then the Iranians tried biowar against the rest of the planet and a lot of people got killed. That kicked in the drive to reproduce that had been lacking for a hundred years and the native populations began to recover.

  “Some things, Commander Zinder, are just cultural. There is no accounting for the fondness in Europe for Elvis or for cowboys in general.”

  “Elvis wasn’t a cowboy, sir,” David told him.

  Instead of taking offense, Commodore Shipley laughed and slapped his thigh. “I know that, you know that -- anyone with a brain knows that. But Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, developed their own version of the history of American west. When Josef Stepanowski introduced himself to his roommate and his suitemates he said, and I quote: ‘I’m Joe Stepanowski. But you can call me Durango!’”

  David blinked. Well, he probably had a few strange foibles himself. He couldn’t think of one offhand, but that was probably why it was a foible.

  Commodore Shipley finished his thought. “Four years later we graduated from the Rim Academy. By then Joe had grown a lot, but the only way to shake that nickname, which made him look pretty much an idiot, was to change it slightly. So Durango became ‘Dranga,’ which does have vaguely Slavic sound to it. Better if you just call him ‘Admiral Stepanowski.’”

  * * *

  They spent quite a bit of time working on plans for tracking exercises with the new equipment and, faced with a united front, Admiral Stepanowski raised no objections. He had no objections to creation of laser platforms based on Fleet auxiliaries and not additional laser-armed warships.

  A week later David was hard at work on a Fleet exercise that would be held out in the local asteroid belt. It was beyond the fan well, so ships could, in theory orient and rush back to New Cairo as needed. Still, Admiral Stepanowski wouldn’t let them use more than a third of the available ships for the exercise.

  There were a number of useful exercises for only ten ships, however, and David was attempting whip up something a little more exciting than the usual Fleet exercise.

  Commodore Cross entered his office and sat down. “You had a shipmate on Starfarer’s Dream, one Robert Shannon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Admiral Stepanowski wants to court-martial him and have him shot on a morals charge -- the young man is living with a thirteen-year-old girl.”

  David explained what had happened to Sarah Grant’s parents at the Peach Habitat in the Tannenbaum system. Like everyone else who worked in space, the commodore was furious about the trickery used. David had nodded at that. “My father, sir, is highly skilled project manager -- they had roped him in with the scheme as well, he and my mother, my younger sister and I were en route to Tannenbaum when we got involved with the alien attack on New Texas. My father is sharp, Commodore. I have no idea how they tricked my father, but if I were those who did so, I’d make sure he never finds one of them back on Earth -- my father will kill them for risking his family’s life.”

  “And this Sarah Grant?”

  “Her parents elected to stay and train up. They didn’t have any kind of luck -- they were both killed. Her brother was also killed in another separate accident. I saw Sarah a few times on Starfarer’s Dream. She was about as happy someone could be who was dragged halfway across the Federation, orphaned, lost her brother and got caught up in one of the few battles we won at the start of the war.

  “Bob Shannon is a good pilot, sir. All I know is that Captain Travers approved the two of them quartering together. Bob told me he had adopted her.”

  Commodore Cross nodded. “I talked to Shannon, off the record; I don’t want to get messed up in something that is certainly to be a distraction that we don’t need. My own experience cries out that Shannon should be jailed. However, it is my understanding that that’s not how it works on the Rim. Orphans, past a certain age, can elect emancipation and then have all the rights and privileges of an adult.”

  “I can’t believe Captain Travers didn’t know of their living arrangements, sir. I’d not heard that about emancipation.” He paused, remembering the young girl from Tenebra. “Sir, on City of Manhattan, I met another orphaned girl about the same age as Sarah Grant. She was a Tenebra orphan. At one point Vice Admiral Dennis Booth mentioned that she was just killing time, waiting until she was old enough to matriculate at one of the Fleet Academies. He promoted her to Kriegspiel captain and told her that he would do his best to expedite her enlistment in the Fleet. After New Texas things were confused and I lost track of her.

  “At one time or other, I met all of the parents of the other Kriegspiel players aboard; I never met hers and I never heard them mentioned. Perhaps...”

  “Yes, indeed,” Commodore Cross laughed. “I had a message not so long ago from my rather dim brother who joined the Fleet at the same time
I did. He was there at Tenebra; he resigned afterwards. Now he’s finally realized the truth of things and he’s rejoined the Fleet. To my eternal surprise he didn’t put up a fight when Amanda, his daughter, joined the Fleet a year early.

  “I was a little surprised when I heard that, because I know the rules on underage enlistments. The minimum age is supposed to be eighteen, or seventeen with a waiver from both Fleet and the individual.

  “Captain Travers is rather famous in the Fleet now, for his penchant for recruiting younger officers. He did the waivers himself, and the waivers from the parents were a slam dunk. Worse, from the point of view of a lot of the more staid members of the Fleet, he promoted those individuals.”

  “Yes, sir. You understand, Commodore, that I benefited from those decisions of Captain Travers, sir. But Captain Travers didn’t enlist me in the Fleet -- Admiral Booth did, with the concurrence of the Aloft commander at New Texas, Rear Admiral Thomas Wu.”

  “But Travers promoted you, yes?”

  “Yes, sir. I passed the navigation, sensor and communication watchkeeping exams on the same day. He made me a junior lieutenant. A few days later I passed the propulsion engineering watchkeeping exam. Since then I’ve taken the power watchkeeping exam as well as the bridge exam.”

  “And the latter is why you’re a lieutenant commander. Not to worry, David. I’m just trying to settle my arguments in my head. Like I said, even if I agreed that Shannon was doing something wrong -- which I don’t -- I wouldn’t want the distraction. Thank you, Commander Zinder.”

  Commodore Cross got up and left and David turned back to the exercise planning.

  * * *

  A week later David was standing before Admiral Stepanowski; he stood between Commodores Cross and Shipley.

  “I thought I made it clear, Commodore Cross. No more than half of the ships in the system are to be involved in a single exercise.”

  Commodore Shipley spoke up. “Admiral, we never have more than a third, and usually just a quarter of our ships off station at once. They come in on High Fan, and ships around New Cairo detect them and stipulate a reaction. We can’t, Admiral, have half of Fleet Aloft sitting on their cans playing with themselves. We bring in the ships on penetration missions on unexpected vectors and expect the ship commanders aloft to react appropriately.”

  “They are doing so without reference to the ground!” Admiral Stepanowski exclaimed.

  Commodore Shipley was patient. “Sir, you told the captains not to bother you with reactions to exercises. You can hardly complain that they are complying with your orders.”

  It was clear, David thought, that the admiral wished to do exactly that.

  Two days later Admiral Stepanowski was back, complaining about additional targeting that had been laid on shipping in the system.

  The admiral wasn’t a detail person and had missed David’s arming of a half dozen intra-system cargo ships with a single blue apiece. Twice now, one of those ships had snuck into blue range of the planet and toasted the Fleet base, while not showing an IFF transponder.

  The admiral was blunt, when speaking to Commodore Shipley and David. “You are to stop readiness exercises that use more than one or two ships inside the fan well! You are wasting too much time that the other ships could use to other ends.

  “And there is too much chance of a mistake when ships have their transponders turned off!”

  Commodore Shipley was firm. “Sir, what other ends are there? We’re either on our toes until further notice or we could abruptly become toast. All we are asking of the ships inside the fan well is that they be alert and report any tracks they detect.

  “What should they be doing right now, even without readiness exercises? Being alert and reporting any tracks that they detect. Exercises are always coordinated with the captains and they are on the bridge so that they can control the exercise. This is what we do, Admiral Stepanowski, when we train.

  “As for the ships without transponders, sir, please! You have to see that that is a hole in our defensive armor! It’s too easy for a ship without a transponder to get in close. Admiral! The enemy does not have anything we’ve seen like transponders! And they’d have to be insane to use them when they are trying to sneak up on us.”

  The arguments ranged from petty to major; from simple to complex. David spent half his time trying to outthink Admiral Stepanowski’s next move, instead of concentrating on exercises and preparedness. It was very frustrating.

  Then one day Bob Shannon knocked on his office door. “David, just to let you know -- the admiral finally got his way; I’ve been booted off the ship. They are sending me back to Earth for reassignment -- and, I’m happy to say, Sarah as well.”

  “I’m sorry how this has worked out,” David told him.

  Shannon laughed. “No you’re not. Stepanowski’s an idiot and he’s going to get everyone here killed. I jumped for joy and tap-danced for ten minutes when I received my orders. We are booked on a ship leaving later today.”

  He waved down towards New Cairo, the planet. “You realize that the lack of confidence in that moron has seeped into the local government? They know the man’s an idiot. People have booked passages for months in advance, trying to get away before it falls apart. Without a Fleet priority, we’d have been stuck here.”

  “Well, we have nearly fifty armed ships in system now,” David told him. “We won’t go quietly into the night.”

  Robert Shannon saluted him. “Good luck, David. You’re going to need it!”

  “You too, Bob. If you see Admiral Booth before I do, tell him I’d rather have designs on a porcupine than his daughter.”

  Bob laughed. “I’ll remember. Take care, David.”

  * * *

  It was just one more thing, another distraction. David’s life became a series of goals and milestones, preparations and nervous waiting. There were times he felt like screaming, but he kept his outward demeanor calm, as did everyone else on the Ramses’ crew.

  It was, he’d long since learned from Fleet Command, something you had to do as an officer. No matter how terrible things were, you had to be outwardly calm, collected and unperturbed. When he’d first joined the Starfarer’s Dream, he’d thought a lot of the humor he heard aboard was, at best, inappropriate for being at war when billions of people had been foully murdered.

  But that was it, really. If you started thinking on those billions it didn’t take very long before you went off the deep end. He wasn’t sure how others did it, but he had a little compartment in his brain, walled away from everything else where those people still lived. You couldn’t dwell on it, but you couldn’t forget it either. Better to laugh, no matter how forced or strained.

  Admiral Stepanowski was no laughing matter, however. Twice the admiral had made up reasons why Commodore Cross should go down to the planet, leaving David, and to a lesser extent, Commodore Shipley, helpless before the admiral.

  Finally one morning it came to a head. In their morning meeting with the admiral, Admiral Stepanowski told Commodore Cross that he was to go down to New Cairo and arrange berthing for fourteen of the available ships.

  Everyone in the room blinked. “What?” Commodore Cross asked, startled. “Why would we put half of our warships on the ground?”

  “The men are tired, Commodore. They’ve been running on continuous alert for nearly three weeks. They need a few days shore leave. After the first half finishes, we’ll send the rest.”

  “You can’t do that, Admiral Stepanowski,” Commodore Shipley told him. “You simply can’t ground that many ships at once. So what if the crews are tired? I grant you running twelve hours on watch and twelve off isn’t the easiest thing to do, but most of our people are young. Taking half of our combat power offline at once would never be permitted.”

  “I determine what’s permitted here, and I command, not you. Commodore Cross, you will see to berthing for fourteen cruisers, starting forty-eight hours from now.”

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, the
admiral turned to David. “I told you that the tracking exercises were to cease did I not?”

  “Yes, sir. There are only three ships left out of the fan well and they are due to return before 1200 local time today.”

  “You are not to run a tracking exercise again, without my direct and specific permission, Lieutenant Commander! Recall those ships and stand down.”

  David blinked and said disbelievingly, “Stand down, Admiral?”

  “Stand down. We are going to return to regular watches.”

  Commodore Cross was on that like a dog on a rat. “Sir, we could never justify to higher command not being on alert.”

  “I’m not saying that I want the duty watch to snooze, Commodore. But it will mean that only a quarter of the crews will be at their positions at any one time instead of half. I don’t believe that that will appreciably affect our readiness.”

  “You don’t think putting half of our ships on the ground, and reducing manning by half on those ships still aloft, sitting helpless in the fan well, won’t affect readiness?” The commodore was nearly spitting in anger.

  “You will do as I order, Commodore! I will brook no further discussion.”

  “As you say, Admiral, you do command, so it will be as you command. I regret to inform you, sir, that I will report this through channels and Fleet will decide what action should be taken.”

  “You’ve hated me from the day you arrived!”

  “I don’t hate you, Admiral. My job is to train the men and women of this command and prepare a battle plan that will maximize our chances of successfully defending this planet. Sorry, Admiral, but there is nothing in my mission statement about you, one way or another.

  “This, Admiral, is an unconscionable action, given the circumstances and I would be remiss in my duties if I failed to protest.”