by David Weber
At the same time, running parallel with that theoretically rigid attitude was a carefully tailored flexibility that might almost have been mistaken for laxness. Failures were spotted and the guilty parties properly taken to task, but not every failure made it into the official record. Minor problems arising from ignorance or inexperience were simply corrected, with a stern lecture but no permanent consequences. Only when the lesson failed to take root did the official hammer come down on the perpetrator, with the second lecture often laced with some of the most creative invective Travis had ever heard.
But in Travis’s experience, that second discipline was seldom needed. As with Vanguard’s enlisted, Guardian’s crew seemed to take their cue from the officers’ standards and attitude. Captain Eigen set the bar high, and his people responded in kind.
It was a command philosophy that saved Travis’s neck in more ways than one. His promotion to petty officer had put him in official command of the destroyer’s gravitics techs—all two of them—and the casual rule-breaking that had been the norm on Vanguard would have driven him insane with a losing effort to keep order. On Guardian, though, the techs were competent, respectful of authority—even Travis’s—and adhered to the regs well enough that their occasional lapses weren’t too hard to overlook.
Especially since Travis himself made plenty of mistakes in his first weeks, most of them minor, all of them frustrating. Again, Guardian’s unofficial patience level came to his rescue, as both the bosun and the lieutenant in charge of the destroyer’s electronics exercised the same tough patience with him that he was learning to exercise with his subordinates. Slowly, under their tutelage, he learned to strike the same delicate balance they did.
The crew wasn’t composed of robots, of course, and there were still plenty of hijinks during off-duty hours. But again unlike Vanguard, everyone seemed to understand that there were lines they weren’t to cross, and they mostly stayed behind them.
And as for his efforts toward his gravitics specialist rating . . .
“There,” Lieutenant Ioanna Kountouriote said, jabbing her slightly crooked forefinger at the center gravitics display. “Did you see it?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Travis managed, fighting back the sudden bout of nausea that had hammered across him as the ship crossed the Alpha wall back into N-space. He’d experienced this once before, back when Vanguard did her microjump between Manticore-A and Manticore-B, and at the time he’d hoped that the severity of the sickness was at least partially due to the crossing-the-wall hazing he and the other first-timers had also been going through.
But it was just as bad the second time as it had been the first. At least this time he’d known enough to adjust his meal schedule so that his stomach would be empty, which relieved him of the worry that he was about to flood CIC with yuck.
Adding to the aggravation was the fact that Kountouriote and the other officers and ratings around him seemed completely unfazed by the experience. He hoped they were just faking it.
“That was the secondary gravitic ripple coming from the energy bleed off our Warshawski sails as we translated to N-space,” Kountouriote identified the twitch. “It’s pretty small, especially compared to the noise the hyper footprint kicks out, and it’s almost undetectable even from your own ship. But transitionals like that add to your database on how your nodes are doing. All part of the sys op’s job.” She waved at the display again. “Now you know what one of those is supposed to look like.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said, taking a slightly deeper breath as the nausea faded away. “Thank you, Ma’am.”
Kountouriote grunted. “No problem. Thank the captain that he likes to see young skulls full of vacuum filled with something more useful than sports scores and card-draw odds.”
“I would never bother with card odds, Ma’am,” Travis assured her.
“That’s why you usually lose,” the petty officer two consoles down at the lidar station murmured.
Travis smiled lopsidedly. Six months ago, back on Vanguard, a comment like that would have dropped him into a pit of frustration and silent anger. Now, he could recognize it as plain simple truth. “Which is why I don’t usually play,” he said.
“Eyes on the prize, Long,” Kountouriote said tersely. “Here we go. Watch what happens when the Warshawski sails reconfigure as the wedge.”
Across the compartment at Travis’s right the door slid open. Reflexively, he tensed as he shot a look sideways. Captain Eigen had dropped into CIC once while Travis was watching over Kountouriote’s shoulder, and despite the fact that Guardian’s commander had given Travis permission to observe during non-action periods he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was someplace where he wasn’t supposed to be. Someday, Eigen was bound to realize that, too.
But it wasn’t the captain. It was, instead, Commander Metzger.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Metzger greeted the group as she floated in and headed toward her station. Like Travis, she’d been promoted when she came aboard Guardian, from lieutenant commander to full commander, and from tactical officer to executive officer.
And as the rest of the officers and ratings in the compartment murmured their return greetings, Metzger’s eyes locked onto Travis’s. “Long,” she added.
“Ma’am,” Travis said, turning quickly back to the board as his heartbeat picked up again.
Because somewhere along the line, the newly minted XO seemed to have taken an unusual interest in the newly minted gravitics technician third class, Travis Long.
Travis had certainly not expected any such attention when he discovered they’d both been transferred to Guardian. But in retrospect, he realized that it was almost inevitable. Outside of Vanguard’s bridge crew, he was the only one who knew that the missile delivery plan during the Phobos crisis had been his idea, not Metzger’s. It only made sense for her to keep an eye on him to make sure that secret didn’t spread elsewhere and possibly embarrass the people involved.
It sounded paranoid, he knew, and probably was. But there was no getting around the fact that the only other nonbridge person besides Travis who knew about the lie was Lieutenant Donnelly . . . who was also now aboard Guardian. Throw in Colonel Massingill, the Casey-Rosewood commander who’d had him on the carpet over Chomps’s stolen cookies, and it was starting to look like everyone he’d ever had a major run-in with had been put aboard this one particular ship. Maybe even with the goal of keeping an eye on him?
He rolled his eyes, feeling a surge of disgust. Ridiculous. No, this was just the normal shake-up that periodically took place in every ship’s company, probably with the added push of officers cashing in favors to get to fly a real honest-to-Pete interstellar trip. The fact that Metzger, Donnelly, and Massingill were all here was surely pure coincidence.
Still, when Travis was a child his uncle had warned him never to trust in coincidence. It had seemed like good advice then, and it was probably good advice now.
Something on the display caught his eye, eleven or twelve light-seconds inward from them. “Is that another wedge, Ma’am?” he asked, pointing to it as he forced his mind away from shadowy conspiracy theories and back to the task at hand.
“Sure is,” Kountouriote said, tapping the intercom key. “Bridge; CIC. New contact bearing zero one seven by zero one three; distance one-point-seven million klicks. Passing to plot now. From the wedge strength, looks like a merchant.” She clicked off her mike. “Probably Solarian design,” she added to Travis. “At a guess, Llama II class.”
“Acknowledged,” Captain Eigen’s calm voice came from the CIC speaker. Another one, Travis suspected, who either didn’t feel translation sickness or hid it well. “Patty, get a com laser on them. Find out if they’re buying or selling. Then—” His voice cut off as he closed his mike.
“Buying or selling?” Travis murmured.
“Here for the ship sale, or just a random merchant,” Kountouriote murmured back. “Though given it’s Secour, the odds of the latter are probably pretty slim.
”
“Oh,” Travis said, frowning at the display. He’d barely been able to tell that it was an impeller wedge, let alone the design, origin, and class of the ship riding between the stress bands. “You really got all that just from her wedge, Ma’am?”
“It’s an art and a science,” Kountouriote said in a lofty voice. “It comes from experience.”
“Or it comes from learning how to snow the new kids on the street,” Metzger put in dryly. “Her vector suggests she’s in from Casca or Zuckerman, which means either the Solarian or the Havenite merchant circuit, and both of those use Llamas.”
“Oh,” Travis said, his face warming.
“Like the lieutenant said, there’s an art to filling in the gaps,” the lidar operator spoke up. “But if you don’t fill them in right, the snow blows back in your own face.” He tapped his display for emphasis. “Y’see, that’s not a Llama. It’s a Packrat III.”
“A Packrat?” Kountouriote echoed, leaning closer to her displays. “What the hell’s a Packrat doing out—?”
“Greetings, Guardian,” a cheerful voice boomed from the CIC speaker. Another difference between Vanguard and Guardian, Travis noted approvingly: unlike Captain Davison’s more traditional approach to bridge/CIC communication protocols, Captain Eigen’s SOP was to automatically pipe all outside signals straight to the Tactical crew.
Which really only made sense. The men and women in CIC would be the first to analyze and interpret any situation that arose, and the captain wanted them in the loop right from the start. “This is the merchantman Wanderer, Captain Oberon Jalla at your service. Am I reading this ID right? You’re Manticoran?”
“Yes, we are,” the captain’s reply came over the speakers. “Are you here for the Havenite sale?”
The conversation flagged as the question started its twelve-second round trip. “What’s the problem with a Packrat freighter, Ma’am?” Travis asked quietly.
“They’re just not very common out here, that’s all,” Kountouriote said. “They mostly do the outer Solarian League routes.”
“Could be someone’s trying to expand their business into this region,” Metzger suggested.
“Countess Acton won’t be happy with that news,” someone else said.
“The countess has been talking for years about building more freighters to add to the one she’s already got,” Kountouriote explained to Travis. “More League competition is likely to put those plans on the back shelf.”
Travis nodded. Acton and Samuel Tilliotson were the rival owners of Manticore’s two single-ship freight companies, both of them running short-haul routes with the Star Kingdom’s neighbors. His mother had looked into investing in one of the firms when Travis was a teenager, but had decided that with Havenite and Solarian freighters handling the bulk of the traffic in the area it was unlikely a local group could get enough foothold to turn a serious profit.
“Good lord, no,” Jalla’s answer came. “The Concordia Shipping Company of Third Brunswick is hardly in the market for new ships, especially warships without a scrap of real shipping space. But we do have some passengers aboard from Ueshiba who may be looking to buy.”
“Really,” Eigen said. “Official government passengers?”
Travis frowned as the time-delay once again temporarily interrupted the conversation. Odd—Ueshiba was several degrees off the vector Kountouriote had marked as Wanderer’s entry angle. Had they taken a detour? He looked over at the plot, trying to gauge vectors and angles . . .
“Waste of time,” Kountouriote murmured.
“Excuse me, Ma’am?” Travis asked, frowning.
“I can see those wheels turning in there,” Kountouriote said, pointing a finger at his head and turning it around. “You’re trying to figure out whether or not they really did come from Ueshiba. Like I said, waste of time. For starters, the grav waves out here aren’t nearly as well mapped out as we’d like, and if their captain managed to catch one he could have gone way off direct vector. He also might have stopped off somewhere after Ueshiba. Zuckerman, Casca, maybe even Ramon.” She winced. “Though there’s not much at Ramon to draw outworld visitors.”
A shiver ran up Travis’s back. A hundred years ago, Ramon had been systematically ravaged and looted by the Free Brotherhood, who had spent several years sucking the planet dry before moving on to Zuckerman and fresh victims. The Ramonian economy still hadn’t completely recovered from that devastation.
The politicians in Parliament who were so eager to dismantle the Navy might have forgotten about Ramon and the threat of groups like the Brotherhood. It was for damn sure the Ramonians never would.
“They’re working to get their society and infrastructure back together,” Metzger said. “But you’re right—there’s not much trade to be had there. Still, it was more or less on Wanderer’s route. Maybe they decided to swing by and take a look. Ham, pull me up the specs on Packrats.”
“Far as I know, they’re as official as you can get,” Jalla’s voice came over the speaker. This communications time-delay stuff, Travis decided, was a pain in the butt even when you were used to it. “Why do you ask?”
“Because Manticore sent a courier a few months ago to pick up the official Ueshiba delegates,” Eigen said. “Did they not arrive?”
“Here’s what we’ve got on the Packrat, Ma’am,” the rating at Tracking One murmured, his words accompanied by a set of simultaneous flickers as he sent the schematic to all the other stations. “Six hundred fifty meters long, about a million tons, one-gee toroidal spin section, six transfer shuttles. A little on the small side, but otherwise pretty straightforward freighter design.”
“Crew size?”
“Twenty to twenty-five, Ma’am,” the rating said. “There’s also room for probably fifty or sixty passengers.”
“I don’t know anything about any courier ship,” Jalla came back. “Hang on—let me patch you into the head of the delegation.”
There was a short pause. “I thought Diactoros had an escort,” Travis said.
“They did,” Kountouriote said. “HMS Perseus. It would take something pretty nasty to take her out.”
“Impossible,” Tracking said sourly. “According to Parliament, there’s nothing out here but rainbows and fluffy bunnies.”
“Captain Eigen, this is Moss Guzarwan, plenipotentiary and chief delegate of the Ueshiban Government,” an authoritative voice came over the speaker. “How may I help you?”
“I was inquiring as to why you’re aboard a freighter instead of the Manticoran fast-courier ship Diactoros,” Eigen said. “She was sent to bring you here, along with representatives from some of our other neighbors.”
Another time-delay silence descended on the compartment. Apparently, everyone in CIC had run out of other things to talk about.
“I know nothing about any courier,” Guzarwan said. “Wait a moment. You said a fast-courier? Well, of course. This is a Packrat merchantman, Captain. Obviously, I and my party left Ueshiba long before your courier arrived.”
“Why didn’t you wait for it?” Eigen said. “No offense to Captain Jalla, but I’m sure Diactoros’s accommodations are more comfortable than his.”
“That’s for sure,” the Tracking One rating put in. “Packrats are about as bare-bones as you can get.”
“To be perfectly blunt, Captain, some members of our government weren’t convinced you would actually send the courier as you’d promised. Though I wasn’t one of them, I assure you. Since we didn’t want to miss the meeting, when we learned Captain Jalla was bringing Wanderer to the Secour system anyway, we decided to add a second string to our bow by sending a back-up delegation. As, I assume from your presence, Manticore itself did?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Eigen said. “I hope Captain Jalla finds enough business here to justify a voyage of this length.”
“Oh, we’re paying him well for his services,” Guzarwan said dryly after the usual pause. “On top of that, he’s hoping he can buy
a pair of P-409-R processing cores for his impeller ring without having to go all the way to Haven or else paying the ridiculous mark-up that the local merchants charge.”
“P-409s are an expensive item,” Eigen commented. “What kind of problem are you having?”
“Long, you know anything about P-409-Rs?” Metzger asked into the silence. “I understand you’ve had some training in impeller tech.”
“I’m not sure we actually use the 9-Rs, Ma’am” Travis said, trying to remember those early classes at Casey-Rosewood. Impeller nodes were insanely complicated things, but like everything else in the universe they were built from a limited list of components. P-409s were an important part of that list: processing cores that could be linked together to create the massive computer power necessary for managing plasma on an atom-to-atom basis in the impeller nodes. Processing cores were fast, densely packed, incredibly powerful, and—as Eigen had already mentioned—incredibly not cheap. “Casey may use them, but I think the 9-B is the most modern type we have onboard.”
“Havenite ships must use them,” Kountouriote pointed out. “Or maybe they’ve got their own knock-off version. Not much point otherwise for Jalla to think he can score some here.”
“We’re having Klarian instability problems with two of our nodes,” Jalla’s voice came back on. “Nothing serious yet, but my engineer says it could get that way if we don’t replace the cores. I figured the Havenites would have brought a modern warship or two to ride herd on the sale, and was hoping they’d have enough spares that they could afford to sell one or two of them. I don’t suppose you have any you’d be willing to part with?”
“Sorry,” Eigen said. “I’ve checked with Logistics, and we don’t have any of that particular type aboard. Would a P-409-B work for you?”
“That’s a point,” Metzger commented. “About the warships, I mean. I doubt the ships the Havenites are selling are modern enough to need top-of-the-line components. Though I suppose they may have undergone upgrades at some point.”
