The door to their room opened, and a Fleet lieutenant was standing next to Admiral Trudy Swenson.
It was Admiral Swenson who spoke, “Cadet Hightower, I’ve superseded your tactical officer. Monday, report with Ensign Ruiz to her first two classes. After that, report to Captain Shapiro aboard shuttle Mad Hatter for crew familiarization duties. With the exception of those classes the rest of your schedule has been cancelled. You can expect to deploy in two weeks.”
The Fleet lieutenant’s total contribution was, “As you were Ensign, Cadet.” Then the two officers left.
“My heart’s desire,” Susan breathed.
“Be sure what you wish for,” Yolanda told her.
“With the exception of my yellow-belly father and my mother, my uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews emigrated to New Texas two years before the war. They told us we were lucky; an old-style laser hit the planet when it was defended. Only about ten thousand people were killed. My family among them.”
“And you were telling me you have sympathy for my mother? Virtually everyone in the Federation has lost family and friends!
“My fiancée thinks I don’t know the truth about what he’s doing, but I remember everything I’m told or read. My brain is optimized for pattern recognition, and the Federation only has the dimmest glimmer of what that means! And if you are going to crew on my ship -- well, I have no doubts that you won’t be going on a milk run.”
“As I said, my heart’s desire. One of my ancestors died at the Alamo; the Spanish let his pregnant wife go. I’ve had ancestors in most of the wars after that.”
“We should probably get some sleep,” Yolanda told her roommate.
*** ** ***
The two young women went to breakfast together. They talked about general things as they ate. As they were finishing, Susan had a question. “I received notification this morning that I’ve dropped all my classes. This was the first week for most of them; the Swenson’s classes are short, two weeks, and start next Monday -- those are still on.
“Captain Shapiro requested your presence at your ship; I have free time until next week. Can I come with? Get a jump start on the crew familiarization?”
“Sure, Susan.”
They boarded a little electric runabout to ride out to the Fleet basin. There were several stops along the way, and Yolanda exclaimed at the sweeping view of the sea and the ships bobbing in Maunalua Bay.
“I really didn’t look around when we arrived,” Yolanda admitted. “It was raining. I’ve only seen the Atlantic before when I lived in England. It seemed like it was always foggy and overcast. This is magnificent!”
“I’m from West Texas, which is mostly desert. I love the desert, but it has a rather -- austere -- beauty. This is lush beauty. The Fleet gives cadets tours on your free time, and even with a war on there’s some of that.” She made a face. “Not much.
“Still, you should go. Hawaii is a gem and even inland, it’s beautiful.” She laughed. “Lushly beautiful.”
They found where the Mad Hatter was, and Yolanda had to laugh. “I’m sorry, Susan. I assumed they berthed it with the ships.” The ship wasn’t berthed, as such. It was behind a medium ridge, having landed on the ground. “It was designed to lift along the length, yes, but there are walkways the length of the ship. It was intended to be entered from the top.”
“It’s larger than a cruiser!” Susan exclaimed.
“You didn’t hear about that?”
“Hear about what?”
“Admiral Fletcher relieved every single sensor officer on duty when I lifted off. The sensor department head of the ship I went to was relieved as well. No one looked.”
Susan paled. “They never looked?”
“I identified as a shuttle.”
“And no one looked? Damned Porties!”
A voice came from behind them. “Cadet, hold your questions.”
The two young women turned. Yolanda saw who was there. “Auntie! Er, Senior Pilot Officer Makaa! Steve!”
Yolanda turned to her roommate. “Cadet Susan Hightower, my aunt, Union Senior Pilot Officer Makaa and this is Steve Yardley, my fiancée.”
Makaa looked at Susan seriously. “You keep thinking about asking an entirely reasonable question. Alas, a reportable security violation. You really don’t want to do that except in a secure briefing.”
Makaa laughed. “No, that question is no longer classified within the Fleet. The Union has telepaths.”
“How can I work when I can’t ask questions?”
Steve Yardley smiled thinly. “You are working for I-Branch as a junior officer. Junior I-Branch officers don’t ask questions about ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how.’ That will come later.”
“You landed my ship wrong, Auntie,” Yolanda told her relative.
“I had a Marine pilot to do the work. He assured me he was thoroughly familiar with Mad Hatter’s flight systems. He realized his mistake when he was halfway down the ladder after we landed.”
Makaa was still grinning. “Presto!” The ship lifted a few meters into the air, and then said, ‘Chango!” The ship continued to drift up, and Makaa waved her hands in time with the ship’s movement, until it was flat, but a hundred meters above ground level. It still drifted upwards, then moved towards the ship basin.
“Gosh, Yolie! I can’t hear anything!” Steve said.
“Even I am impressed with Captain Shapiro’s ship handling prowess!” Makaa added. She laughed aloud. “I suspect that is because of the natural abilities of a fighter pilot!”
Steve sighed. “I wonder how I’d have done as a fighter pilot?”
Makaa turned and slapped him once, hard. “Shapiro has commanded some six hundred pilots over the years. Maybe a hundred of them are still alive.”
She took pity on him. “I have finally met someone I can respect. I never imagined I would ever do more than practice. Where were our enemies? The Federation would have taken five hundred or more years before they found us.
“My whole professional life I’ve had that mistaken assumption thrown in my face in ways I never imagined.”
She made a chopping motion with her hand. “Let’s get to the ship basin.”
The walked aboard the Mad Hatter after a conversation with a thoroughly mystified Port lieutenant in charge of the berthing office. “First I had to find ground facilities for a ship that size. Then I had to find a berth for a ship that size. And I’ve been ordered to log it as a shuttle!”
Steve was cruel. “If you’ve done what you have been told, you’re okay. More than fifty officers have been relieved for misidentifying that class of ship -- including a captain.”
They boarded the ship and were greeted by Captain Shapiro. “Goodness! I worked on the automation for the Hero-class of ships. This is light years better than we did!”
“How did you get aboard, Captain?” Yolanda asked.
“I got an early start and I admit my legs are just a bit wobbly after a three hundred meter climb up a free shaft.”
“I only climbed that three times; other times my mother let me use the stairs.”
“Stairs? There are stairs? I’m going to kill that Marine!”
“In fairness, Captain, I didn’t tell him,” Makaa said. “He had only a rudimentary knowledge of the ship’s systems, because it was built here, using a combination of Fleet and Union technology. I didn’t know much about the systems, either.”
She gestured further forward. “Now we need to let these young people ooh and ahh about what they see, while you and I have a private discussion concerning the mission and other details.”
Yolanda talked and Susan listened, but Steve didn’t seem to be paying much attention. Susan looked at him. “I understand about not asking questions, but it makes things harder.”
“Then don’t ask questions. You need to learn observation. Yolanda and I are going to be married. You should assume that we know each other well. You need to put facts together, without asking questions. Public records, gossip -- y
ou have to evaluate the things you learn and how they might be related. Asking a question of someone you know is not cleared for something is legitimate -- but you have to be cautious, because you won’t always know.
“Take a simple thing. You can look up my age; my public records are an open book. What was Yolanda?”
“A deep-cover agent.”
“And what does she remember?”
“Practically everything.”
“And what might you presume about the public records of a deep-cover agent?”
“Oh! Fiction!”
“And, consider that the Union has had deep-cover agents in the Federation since Kinsella -- and we never noticed. What might you abstract about the average abilities of one of those agents?”
“They are good.”
“Exactly. You need to learn to think about things like this, Cadet. You will have fewer questions and a better understanding of what questions you should ask.”
“And you have associated with Yolanda for a while, long enough to have learned a thing or two. Like her ship; like tradecraft.”
“You need to learn to rate the information you learn for validity. When you report your observations, you need to tell the person you report to what your ratings of the information is. That person is going to rate you depending on how they evaluate your information.”
“I am humbled, Lieutenant. I see someone younger than I am promoted ahead of me and it rankles. I listen to you and realize I am way, way out of my league,” Susan said.
Yolanda spoke for the first time in a bit. “Admiral Fletcher is Steve’s rabbi. He’s not the first admiral in line, either -- just the most senior.”
“Cadet Hightower, listen to me. I am not snowing you, putting you on or anything like that. Yesterday I was talking to my roommate, a pleasant fellow. I was telling him on my first day in the Fleet, a master chief saw something in me. She calls it ‘a spark.’ I told my roommate that a genius is the last one to know.
“I’ve talked with other special project officers. All of them feel they are unworthy and some fine people have made mistakes judging us.
“Except, of course, there are the results produced by special project officers. You, Cadet, are more like me than not. I can see sparks; evidently you can’t see your own, but you can see it on others. Go gently, Susan. Life will get interesting in very short order.”
“And that’s why I’m along for this mission? It’s not just that Captain Shapiro thinks I have a cute butt?”
“Senior Pilot Officer Makaa and Captain Shapiro are getting acquainted, Cadet. You’ll be along so they can spend at least eight hours a day in bed together.”
Susan grimaced and Steve smiled. “Yep! Let me tell you what we will be doing. Yolie -- tell me, does the Union know what happens when two ships are traveling in tandem on High Fan -- and one of them cuts loose?”
“They turn to space gas,” Yolanda guessed.
“Actually, the second ship drops from High Fan with the original intrinsic. The second ship is free to maneuver on burner cans. Oh yes, the second ship also has its intrinsic detectability.”
“Jesus! You could get in undetected!”
“Both sides scour the path of ships on High Fan that pass close to something important. As you can tell, this is not general knowledge.”
“Yes, sir!” Susan said with enthusiasm.
Captain Shapiro and Makaa appeared, looking rumpled.
“You, Ensign Ruiz, may visit Mad Hatter during duty hours, accompanied by myself or Senior Pilot Officer Makaa. You, Cadet Hightower, are given twenty-four/seven access with the usual duty hours proviso. You, Lieutenant Yardley, may not return at any time for any reason,” the captain ordered.
“I understand, sir,” Susan told her, to be echoed by Steve.
“Admiral Thor Swenson will sit on one end of a wooden bench, from 1300 to 1500 for the next three days, Yardley. You, Lieutenant, will be on the other end -- think of it as Socrates and Plato.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Wish Makaa and I luck.”
Steve chuckled. “You don’t need luck, Captain.”
“My crew chief deployed with Cindy Rhodes. She returned infatuated with a Portie engineer, a commander, now a captain. Chief Shinzu required of the commander to write every day, ‘I will make Shinzu happy each and every day.’
“They are married now. Makaa and I will be getting hitched as well.”
Steve bowed low. “I hope you two please each other, Captain.”
“You young scalawag! Rest assured! Get some lunch, you, Lieutenant, report to Admiral Thor Swenson as soon as you finish. Ruiz and Hightower, discuss Admiral Trudy Swenson’s practicum topic. I promise you, no matter how much you discuss it, you will find yourself unprepared on Monday.”
After lunch the three found their way to the offices shared by the Admiral Swensons. Only Admiral Thor Swenson was there, and he patiently listen to Steve explain why they were there.
“It’s a good thing Trudy isn’t here. Practicum is about individual study. You have to research a topic and report on it in class and a written report. Trudy likes surprises, you see. Me, I abhor them, but then, that’s me. Leave, the two of you. One thing you don’t want to do is talk about the practicum, not with anyone. Yardley, come with me.”
Steve followed the admiral down a hallway to a conference room with a Marine guard. The admiral needed to verify his fingerprints and Steve did too.
There was a lectern at one end of the conference and a Fleet captain behind it. Admiral Swenson waved Steve to a seat at the captain’s end of the table, and took his own seat in the seat closest to the door.
“Are you serious? I’m going to give this briefing to a lieutenant?” The condescension dripped from his words.
“Do be serious, Captain. Admiral Fletcher ordered this. I’m just here to clean up, after.”
“I must protest.”
“Go right ahead and protest. The lieutenant is the one who suggested where your brother sensor officers should be sent after their truly monumental foul up a few weeks ago. Just be glad you didn’t intercept any transmissions. Then we would have invited the lieutenant’s girlfriend -- and she’s only a fresh-caught ensign.”
The captain drew himself up, knowing a losing battle with a dinosaur when he saw one.
“During the Big Battle nearly four years ago, a defensive tactic used by our ships and fighters was to transition close to a gas giant, but outside the fan well and let the enemy High Fan homing missiles erroneously fail to make a course change.
“As a result, Jupiter took nearly fifteen hundred gigaton missile hits, with a few more detonating on some of the larger moons.
“Midway through the battle, a fighter detected a ship coming up from Jupiter on burner cans. The fighter couldn’t hang around long enough to get a good look at it, but alerted Dragon and Rome. Dragon was too busy to look, but Rome sent a fighter not under pursuit to check.
“That fighter got a line on the ship, but came under attack and had to depart. As you should know, Jupiter is large enough to have a low fan well in addition to the area where ships can’t go to High Fan.
“A passive sensor tried to track it and couldn’t, but an active sensor began to track it. The ship transitioned to low fan when it could, and then the acceleration increased to nine point two gravities, a three times higher than we ever seen an enemy vessel accelerate.
“A short time later the ship went to High Fan. It dropped less than a minute later, out in the Oort cloud. There evidently it returned to burner cans. The battle was in the process of being decided -- Jensen believed he needed every available ship and fighter. As a result, the track was lost.
“About a year ago, a ship went to High Fan a third of the way around the sun from where the track was lost, but at the same radius. The ship had waited until no ship was close, and scooted at a high percentage of max power.
“Nonetheless, ships were vectored in pursuit. Evidently these aliens had been here a lo
ng time and weren’t aware we could track ships on High Fan -- and that our ships are faster. Shortly before we caught up with them, the ship vanished from our detectors rather abruptly, with no evidence they had tried to come off High Fan.
“Subsequent investigation found the origin of the ship was near a remnant of a gigaton detonation. The area was scoured again anyway, and there are now three ships permanently assigned to the area.
“That’s all I have, Admiral.”
“Yardley, any comments or questions?”
“Were there any signs of the aliens trying to send a message? Particularly near Jupiter?”
The captain looked at Admiral Swenson obviously wanting to know if Steve was cleared.
“Captain, why do you think I’m here, sitting through this for the fourth time? Lieutenant Yardley has a higher security clearance than you do. He has a higher clearance than I do! Answer the question.”
“We didn’t detect any transmissions of any length.”
“A typical alien transmission is a tenth of a second -- comparable to roughly seven minutes long.”
“Compressed? What algorithm?”
“Next question, Lieutenant,” the admiral said roughly.
“If it is possible to backtrack the alien, it would be dandy to know if the weapons strikes were in the close vicinity of that origin. It would be dandier to know if a weapon detonation was detected at the origin location after the alien was clear.”
“There was one about six hundred kilometers away before the ship lifted. I don’t know if anyone noticed something there later -- what eyes we had were on the ship.
“Lieutenant, we have some telemetry but it is most likely useless. By then the volume around Jupiter was filled with millions of charged particles. There is always a lot of lightning on the big guy, which sounds just like a pop of static. The lightning around a gigaton detonation must be horrific.”
Steve turned to Admiral Swenson. “We need to get those recordings. I’ll call Yolanda and Admiral Fletcher. Hopefully we can get that other lieutenant down as well.”
Admiral Swenson slapped his knee. “That other lieutenant has a company of Marines for company, and these days no ship is allowed only one person aboard.”
The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe Book 7) Page 27
