by Blaze Ward
Phil had been expecting a Court Martial when it was all over, but the First Lord of the Fleet had some leeway in the matter, and it wasn’t like too many people were likely to complain that he had pushed back and resisted a little.
Especially when the people behind those very orders he had been questioning were in the process of being brought up on charges of High Crimes and Misdemeanors and bringing the entire government down with them, at least in the short term.
He rose when the door to Petia’s inner office opened and Command Centurion Ming, her current chief of staff, gestured for him to enter.
Phil found himself alone in the small office with his ultimate boss. She rose to shake his hand and sat him in one of the chairs on the visitor side of the desk. She was almost as tall as he was standing, and long-waisted, so she looked him almost in the eyes sitting as well.
She sat and studied him for a long minute, stony faced.
“Am I ever getting Andrea Velazquez back?” Phil asked. “I’m currently operating with an extremely short-staffed legal office out on a dangerous frontier.”
Petia grinned.
“I’ll find Command Centurion Križ a replacement,” she said with a chuckle. “Going to need Andrea and you both here giving testimony when the President and the Grand Council move to try Horvat and Chavarría. This one will go beyond simply Senate Censure, or even a criminal case. It’s entirely possible that Szabolcsi will have to determine, one of these days, if she wants to commute a sentence of death to something lesser.”
“That bad?” Phil asked.
He’d only been back for a short time, just reaching the station above Ladaux under crash transit orders with Cyrus, while leaving the rest of his squadron back in Lincolnshire as a defensive measure. But he had seen some of the worst of his countrymen in the last week.
“Horvat and Chavarría stepped so far over the line that some people are already building mock-gallows as a symbol, Phil,” the First Lord of the Fleet said quietly. “Our job is to keep things calm, as much as possible. At least the rest of us. Your job is to keep being Phil Kosnett.”
“Not funny, Pet,” he snapped.
She might be his ultimate boss, and had been a mentor going back decades, but this was stretching things.
“Phil, the rest of the Navy calls you Professor Kosnett,” she snapped back. “The calm, deliberate officer who studies things deeply before moving or speaking. You used to not have that great a reputation with some of the fire-breathers, but CS-405 cured everybody of that stupidity. Everybody that matters, anyway. Tomorrow, you’ll be called upon to keep being calm and rational. I could have Court Martialed you, but that would bring out everything that the rest of the government will need to make their own case, and you’re already a hero for standing up to Arlo and holding an impossible line against overwhelming odds. Again, I might add.”
“Pet, if Arlo had wanted to do something, he could have ground my squadron into the mud in so many pieces that you’d have never been able to find enough bodies to bury,” Phil said. “Heavy Dreadnaught. A dozen or so expeditionary cruisers. Another dozen or more modern corvettes. We’d have been a fart in a whirlwind.”
“And yet, you rode out to fight him, in spite of overwhelming odds,” she replied. “Engaged him diplomatically. Listened. Weighed his evidence. And sent me Andrea Velazquez to uncover the deepest conspiracy I can ever remember. After Altai, nobody is going to question your courage and ingenuity as a commander again, Phil. After Hemera, they’ll never question your intellect or vision, either.”
“That’s horseshit, First Lord,” Phil said.
He could do that, here in her personal office with the door closed.
“It still works in my favor, and yours, Phil,” she grinned back, finally losing some of the hardness about her eyes. “Everyone presumes Whughy’s next to sit in this chair. He was the one covered in glory for helping Jessica when she needed an administrator. For fighting a few battles in Altai without the First Expeditionary to protect him. Hell, for inventing a new weapons system, so he even has the College of Engineers behind him, which is pretty impressive for a line-serving officer to do.”
Phil nodded. Arott Whughy had gone to First Ballard with Jessica to fight the Red Admiral, taking a battlecruiser up against a battleship in pretty much single combat and fighting it to a draw. Then he had been the administrator that made the Expedition a success, hands down.
“Okay?” he asked. “And?”
“So right now, he’s serving as Commander, Ladaux Station as a First Centurion,” Petia replied. “I need Cyrus back in Lincolnshire. Given the staggering range of damage from that little war, we may end up just selling the squadron to them outright and leaving training crews in place until those folks can handle the ships on their own.”
“About what I was expecting,” Phil nodded. “I was pretty much the only intact force left while I was there. My other six ships are pretty much the only police force they have for another six to nine months.”
“Yes, but I have to have you here,” she pressed. “You, personally, so my plan is to send out a new Fleet Centurion with Cyrus, and have them anchor Lincolnshire’s defenses during that time. And yes, I know how you feel about that.”
Phil thought he had kept the scowl off his face, but probably not deep enough in his eyes for someone that knew him as well as the First Lord did.
“There won’t be any more raiding actions for a long while, Phil,” she continued. “Lincolnshire is offering peace to everyone, and negotiating terms from abject weakness, so nobody there is going to cross a border, even chasing pirates. You’ll accumulate no glory on that station.”
Phil grumbled, but he knew in his soul that she was right.
“Okay, so where do I go?” he asked.
He presumed she was setting him up for a job on her staff. Punching another one of those tickets that most officers needed, if they wanted to make it to the top. He flashed back to Kigali and d’Maine. Neither of those men had any interest in anything but a single warship.
Petia’s smile did very little to comfort him. He suspected sharks would be jealous.
“Assuming I can convince you to take it, I have a different assignment, starting next week, so you’ll have time to turn over command cleanly,” she said.
“Go on,” he replied, already not liking it, but understanding that she was looking out for his career now.
His future, after she was gone. Her way of shaping the officer corps, after everything Nils Kasum had done in his time. Just as Whughy would likely do the same when it was his turn.
“Three years assignment to the Academy, as a visiting professor for law and tactics,” Petia pronounced.
Three YEARS? His fighting career would be over.
But at the same time, if peace was breaking out, it would be anyway, and he’d be right back where he’d been before Keller’s Expedition. Too many officers at the moment when budgets were being cut and people were being put on the shore permanently.
The original gamble that saw him taking command of a corvette/scout, when she’d once promised him a cruiser. But he’d made that work out. In spades.
“What’s the other shoe, Pet?” Phil asked.
He’d known the woman for nearly two decades. He could see the twists and turns in her eyes right now.
“The College of Law wants you to teach Command Ethics,” she laughed. “Command School wants you teaching Advanced Piracy. In two years, you’ll be time-in-grade eligible for your fifth stripe. I’m not sure what happens to First War Fleet, if we really do get peace, but I could see building up a new fleet for exploration across the darkness, since we’ll be hemmed in on three sides. And I don’t know any officer, anywhere, better qualified for scouting, logistics, combat, and command. Do you?”
“One, but she’s never coming back into the black and green,” Phil said seriously.
There was nothing Jessica Keller couldn’t do, if she set her mind to it. He’d seen that personally.
He laughed, in spite of himself.
“What’s so funny?” the First Lord of the Fleet asked, suddenly off-balance.
“Thinking back five years ago, when you gave me CS-405 as a compensation for a cruiser I was too junior to get,” Phil said. “A conversation I had with myself, wondering if I needed to reinvent myself as Phil Kosnett, Explorer Extraordinaire so I could get command of something like RAN Ballard, or one of her sisters.”
“I won’t call them spies, because it doesn’t involve espionage, but I have contacts regularly with Bedrov & Keller’s Penmerth office,” she continued. “That old pirate offered up plans recently for a design that Keller has decided not to build. A Survey Dreadnaught. The licensing fees are steeply discounted, partly because, according to him, he feels a certain fondness to us for breaking him into the big leagues.”
“Oh, shit.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.
“What?”
“That was supposed to be the ship Corynthe was building for Keller for her honeymoon,” Phil explained.
“Why is it bad, if we have them as well?” she pressed him.
“If they’re giving it to you for nothing, that means Bedrov or Nakamura has come up with something different,” Phil said. “They must now consider that design obsolete and second rate, because she’ll get something better.”
“Phil, this design is at least a generation ahead of anything we’ve got, even in our own files,” she retorted.
“You seem to have forgotten that Moirrey zu Kermode, Yan Bedrov, and Pops Nakamura were alone together on Petron for nearly a year, while everybody was off fighting,” he said. “Look at Second Petron for a clue as to what they might have done and not bothered to tell anybody about yet.”
“So we shouldn’t build them?” she asked. “I was thinking of one as a flagship for you, three years from now, when you’re an unemployed First Centurion looking for a challenge.”
“Oh, no. Build it. Absolutely build it,” Phil said. “And ask if they have an improved Galactic Survey Cruiser design we can license. It will be as much a revolution in five years as the Expeditionary-class boats were, five years ago.”
“So you’ll take the job?” she pivoted and a teasing smile came back onto her face. “Teach for a while, then go off exploring when Whughy takes over?”
“You think I might be in line for your seat, in ten or fifteen years when Whughy wants to retire?” Phil asked, plotting out little details and wondering for the first time if he really wanted that job.
Maybe he’d ask Jessica Keller to go counter-clockwise, just so Phil Kosnett, Explorer Extraordinaire, could meet her, going the other direction.
That might be fun.
EPILOGUE – JESSICA
IN THE THIRTEENTH YEAR OF JESSICA KELLER, QUEEN OF THE PIRATES: JULY THE FIRST AT ST. LEGIER
Jessica smiled as she handed Nils a glass of wine and sat down across from him and the Grand Admiral. The three of them were in the faculty lounge at the Imperial Institute where the next generation of Imperial officers came to learn their craft.
She raised her glass and saluted the two men with a smile.
“To peace,” she said.
“To peace,” Nils and Em echoed her.
Around them, she could see several other men, quietly keeping their distance, but still wanting to watch. If having Nils Kasum here teaching was a surprise that these men had finally started to get over after a year, the possibility of Jessica Keller joining him probably had them all on pins and needles.
Not that she was, but it was interesting watching them try to guess what was her purpose.
She was here because it was the easiest place to get these two men isolated from their daily responsibilities so they could talk.
“So what’s next for you?” Nils asked, studying her face for clues.
Jessica shrugged.
“Once the ceremony is done, my plan is to grab Torsten and fly Archangel home as quickly as we can get there,” she said. “Uly has promised us a new vessel as a belated wedding present, so that the two of us can finally get back to the honeymoon that Horvat and Chavarría interrupted.”
“You think things will have settled down by then?” Em asked. “I understand that Lincolnshire is treading lightly, but Salonnia is still unresolved and Aquitaine’s government is still attempting to recover from Horvat and Chavarría being convicted of treason. There are concerns the Republic itself might yet fall.”
“Not my problem,” Jessica replied crisply, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “I promised David a clean start. I intend to become a modern day King Arthur, sailing off to Avalon for now, to return only in his time to need. That lets Lincolnshire come to grips with him being permanently in charge. And he’ll have that entire fleet handy if Aquitaine decides to get stupid. Plus whatever else my three pirate engineers have come up with while we’re all here.”
“So, just like that, you’ll be gone?” Nils asked. “Just doesn’t seem possible, Jess. I remember the first day you walked into one of my classes, the hot-shot set to take the school, the Academy, and the fleet by storm. Has it really been thirty years?”
“A lot can change in that time, Nils,” Jessica smiled at him. “Your hair was still brown then.”
“As I have told Rosemonde on more than one occasion, I can blame you for most of it, Jessica,” Nils laughed. “But look where thirty years has taken us. Who would have imagined Em inviting me to teach here as the safest place in the galaxy for me to hide?”
“Still is,” Em chuckled. “Some of Horvat’s friends will not have forgotten you.”
“Tedrik is going to have to deal with them for now,” Nils said. “I’ve got one more year here, at a minimum, according to your contract. And your journalist hasn’t finished picking my brain, nor yours, so I have to stay available until he finishes his manuscript.”
“This is your fault,” Em turned to Jessica, mock serious. “I would have never published something like this.”
“History needed to know about your duels as well, Em,” Jessica said. “You and Nils as young commanders did so much that set the stage for what came later. Nobody can truly understand me until they understand the two of you first. Plus, I have no doubt that you’ll write Jessica Keller, Volume Two one of these days.”
“Perhaps in my retirement,” Em said. “Grand Admiral is something I took because Joh didn’t have anybody else he trusted to handle the job, just as Casey had even fewer options when she had to stock her government.”
“How long until then, Emmerich?” Nils asked.
“A few more years, I think,” he said. “If Jessica and Torsten complete their grand honeymoon, I might grab Freya and make it a double date the next time. You should see if Rosemonde wants to tour the galaxy, Nils. By then, I’ll have a new generation of leaders I trust coming up, with Tiede and his brothers-in-law: Carsten and Bernard. They’ll be able to hold things while men like Tom Provst and Reif Kingston finish cleaning up the bad apples that have accumulated in the fleet.”
Nils shrugged. Much too far into the future at this point, and they all knew it, but it made for a lovely concept to contemplate.
“And you, Jessica?” Em asked with a smile. “What will the galaxy be like without you threatening everyone’s borders and sanity all the time?”
“I’m hoping that it finally settles down and becomes peaceful,” she said. “Every one of Buran’s fleets have been smashed now. It helps that he programmed them all to die if he did, even if the intent was to prevent one of them going rogue and overthrowing him. With the god dead, the biggest problem has been a rise in crime as pirates flow into that vacuum. I’m hoping that my touring through there will help, since Uly is building me a light battleship as a yacht.”
“And I have continued sending squadrons through on patrols as well,” Em said. “In a few cases, I’ve even begun negotiations with some of the more secure systems to sell them old frigates and cutters that
can eventually form the nucleus of police forces, once they figure out what succeeds the Protectorate of Man. Or rather, how many pieces it will break into before it settles. I expect that frontier to be chaos probably for the rest of Casey’s life, to say nothing of my own, although it does help having Lighthouse Station as a forward base from which my fleets can operate.”
“How is Duke Indovina doing?” Jessica asked.
“Quite well,” Em brightened. “She’ll be here for the wedding, and then to be formally seated in the House of Dukes, now that Casey has managed to corral those old fools. They understand her to be one of the Emperor’s favorites, so have been more accommodating than they might have a year ago.”
“Yet another place to visit, although it’s not really my legend,” Jessica said with a sudden smile. “That one is entirely Phil Kosnett’s fault. Make sure that someone writes a good book to blame him for it.”
“That’s actually the young historian’s project, after he’s done with Em and I,” Nils laughed. “A history of The Expedition, as it were. Phil Kosnett and both Avelina Indovina and Bok Battenhouse will figure prominently, considering how important CS-405’s adventures were to the final outcome of the war itself.”
“Good,” Jessica decided. “Just like the Long Raid, too many people will concentrate on Jessica Keller as the overall commander and forget all the men and women, without whom none of this would have been possible.”
“At least we can say with some certainty that it is over,” Nils said.
Jessica and Em both laughed.
“For you, perhaps,” Em replied gruffly. “Unless you feel like letting me commission you and put you in charge of some things around here so I can relax.”
Jessica laughed out loud at the contemplative look that came into Nils’s eyes. He might have retired as one of the greatest commanders in Aquitaine’s storied history, but the man still missed striding a deck and issuing orders. She knew that.
“What did you have in mind?” Nils asked a little sideways.
