“I guess I’ll see you in a couple of weeks,” Bill Campbell said.
“Good luck with your inspection. Hopefully it’ll be more like Meili than Natchez,” Jan Childers said.
“I hope so, too, but I don’t think so. I can already smell something not right here.”
“You’re thinking of the timing of that last incursion.”
“Exactly. The one time they could catch Admiral Rao’s forces out of position, and they conveniently show up.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
Campbell gave her a stern look.
“OK, OK, I forgot. In Intelligence Division, there’s no such thing as a coincidence.”
“Correct. Someone said something to somebody, and Intelligence didn’t know it was going on. And still doesn’t suspect anything, if I’m reading those reports right.”
“Well, be careful down there,” Childers said.
“I’m a pretty hard target, but I can also take some additional measures, and I will.”
“Good. Take care of yourself. I love you, and I want you to still be around for a while.”
“You, too,” Campbell said. “You’re the one playing laser tag with beam weapons, after all. I’m just a glorified accountant.”
“Yeah. Right. Suspicious bruises on Natchez notwithstanding.”
“Like I said, I fell down the stairs. You know how clumsy I am.”
Childers snorted.
“Well, be careful on the stairs, then. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
Bill Campbell queued with the tactical course instructors headed to Bliss. He was going down to the planet to check in with the chief of planetary intelligence, and to begin his inspection of intelligence operations on the planet. The biggest part of that, on a Commonwealth planet, was counter-intelligence.
During the shuttle trip to the Hannibal, he thought back over the reports he had read. No, there was a hole there. Counter-intelligence reports sounded too pat, too “nothing going on, ho-hum.”
On Waldheim, on Courtney, on Meili, counter-intelligence was all over their responsibility area. They reviewed mail traffic densities, kept an eye on foreign consulate staff, looked for out-of-the-ordinary off-base relationships. They occasionally found things that were suspicious, looked into them further, sometimes caught someone up to no good. But not on Natchez, and, from the looks of things so far, not on Bliss.
Hell, they didn’t even suspect anything after that last incursion.
Not good.
“Shuttle away, Ma’am. All four ships report shuttle departure. Our own shuttles are returning to their racks.”
“Good,” Jan Childers said. “When we have shuttles aboard, halt spin and fold cylinder. Take us back into hyper and comm Captain Dahl.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Senior Captain Brian Dahl commanded the second division of Childers’ squadron from aboard the CSS Donal McNee. They had transitioned out of hyperspace at the southern approach to Bliss, at zero minus zero-nine-zero on the planet.
The Training Division’s instructional staff had been distributed across the ships of Childers’ squadron so they could take advantage of the limited guest quarters aboard the heavy cruisers. To ground-based staff, even VIP quarters aboard ship were tiny and cramped, but being aboard ship was being aboard ship, and that’s just the way it was.
The Donal McNee and her division mates had been met at the southern approaches by the CSS Belisarius and the CSS Marlborough, and transferred their passengers to these two battleships of Admiral Novotny’s second division.
“Dahl here.”
“Brian, Childers here. Did the transfer go okay on your end?”
“Without incident, Ma’am. All our passengers are on the way to Bliss.”
“Excellent. Then I guess it’s patrol duty while the training department does its job.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Back to work.”
Jan laughed. “All right, Brian. Be in touch if you need any help down there.”
“You as well, Ma’am. These guys seem to like to come in from the north.”
“I’m looking forward to it. Childers out.”
The local forces defending Bliss converged on the planet, headed in so their commanding officers, executive officers, and tactical officers could take the two-week classroom training on the standard Fleet Book of Maneuvers, to prepare for the exercises to follow.
On the northern and southern approaches of Bliss, a single heavy cruiser maintained patrol, holding one gravity of acceleration on its patrol route so the crews would have gravity.
Three more heavy cruisers maintained patrol in hyperspace, ready to respond if their pickets reported an incursion.
On Duval, Rear Admiral Frank Stenberg was having an uncomfortable interview with his two-up boss, First Space Lord Admiral Carla Scola.
“It looks like you got snookered in Bliss,” Scola said.
“Yes, it does, but at least I didn’t get all shot up. And they ended up losing two destroyers out of the deal, so they really were pushing those disguises a lot harder than anyone would expect,” Stenberg said.
“Yes, I think your decision was understandable given the power levels you saw. Still, the political types are pushing hard to get us to do something to disable their precious metals production. They’re really hurting us there.”
“Well, it’s going to have to wait a little while.”
“You don’t think now is a good time?” Scola asked. “They’ll only have a single heavy cruiser squadron guarding the system while they’re in training. I would think that would be a good time to get in there and get the job done.”
“That’s Admiral Childers’ squadron you’re talking about, so, no, I don’t think it’s a good time.”
“Is she really that good? One heavy cruiser squadron to cover the whole system?”
“I wouldn’t attack Bliss right now if we had verified proof all CSF forces had been pulled out of the system and it was being defended by Admiral Childers in a vac suit.”
“Really,” Scola said.
“Really. Because it would be a trap. The entire asteroid belt would have been replaced with remote control beam mounts, or every freighter in the system would be a Q-ship, or some other crazy ploy you don’t expect until it kills you. You never know with her.
“Did you see what she did to the Feirman navy? I watched the sensor recordings, and I still have nightmares about it. She destroyed their entire navy in ten minutes. Her two main forces were in normal space for a couple of minutes apiece. That’s it. One minute, the Feirman navy was there, ten minutes later, it was all gone. All of it. And the CSF took no losses. The Feirmians had just enough time to realize she had suckered them before they died.
“Her career is full of stuff like that. Like taking out three heavy cruisers, a light cruiser, and a destroyer in Saarestik with a single heavy cruiser. We don’t even know how she did that – none of the Epsley ships survived to tell the tale – but she was the Senior Tactical Officer on that CSF heavy cruiser, and she got the Distinguished Service Medal for that action, so we know it was her tactical plan. That was just one heavy cruiser, and now she has a whole squadron of them.
“No, it would be easier to just kill all my men and shoot myself. Save all that time and reaction mass spacing out there just to die anyway.”
“Wow,” Scola said. “Well, you’ve studied her career, so you would know better than I. She came along after I got promoted out of tactical command. I guess we’ll just have to wait until she leaves the system.”
“That’s my recommendation. If Admiral Childers and I are never in the same star system at the same time, that’s just fine with me.”
Preparations
On the way to Bliss, alone in his senior guest cabin on the flag bridge of the Hannibal, Bill Campbell thumb-swiped the lock on his equipment case, pulled out the electronics sniffer, and turned it on. He meticulously scanned the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture of the bedroom and adjoinin
g day room, then moved on into the small bath and closet. All clean. There were no electronics in his cabin he didn’t expect to be there. He compared the electronic signatures from the door activation unit and the VR sets to the expected values stored in the device, and it indicated they had not been modified.
Campbell took his equipment out of the case, spread it out on the double bed, and inspected it all carefully. He had two sets of the Commonwealth’s best body armor for himself and one for Jan, several firearms, together with various holsters, cleaning kits, and accessories, a couple thousand rounds of ammunition, a number of knives, both throwing knives and combat knives, several memory chips containing specialized software, some anti-eavesdropping and anti-snooping electronic devices, motion detectors, minicams and recorders, strapping tape, contact cement, a variety of makeup supplies – all the tools of counter-intelligence.
He inspected each item in turn, and replaced most items in their proper compartments in the equipment case. He didn’t know what he would need on this assignment, but you never did. Which is why he inspected everything, thoroughly, every single time.
Campbell stripped down to his skivvies and put on one of the sets of body armor. It was soft and supple but made of an incredibly tough material that would stiffen instantaneously on bullet impact. You would get a hell of a bruise, but no penetration, from a handgun round, and a knife wouldn’t penetrate the tough material even in its relaxed state. The material had a limited number of cycles, and he considered one actual bullet impact to be enough to replace the unit, which is why he carried a spare. Just because you’d been shot once didn’t mean the job was over.
He selected two carry firearms from the case and loaded them. He put on his uniform shirt, then donned the holsters, one high enough on the calf not to show when he sat down and one under the shoulder. He holstered both firearms and put on the rest of his uniform, then inspected himself critically in the mirror.
He wasn’t really expecting any trouble aboard the Hannibal. It was much easier to kill someone and get away with it on the planet than it would be shipboard. Everyone’s movements and whereabouts were too well known, and the suspect pool too small. But he wanted to get back in practice before they reached Bliss. To work out any kinks in his equipment and get used to wearing it all again after the month-long transit.
Campbell knew there was an active espionage ring on Bliss, and the counter-intelligence unit there was not on top of it. There was no way the timing of that last incursion was just a lucky guess. It was likely both intelligence and operations had been infiltrated. Which meant that espionage ring also knew he was coming, to inspect the intelligence operations. They had three options: be all quiet and hope he missed them, pull out of the system, or take him out before he found and outed them. His experience was they would try the first, and, if that didn’t look like it was working, switch to the third. They wouldn’t want to pull out an operation that may have taken years to get into place.
He set a motion detector in his cabin, then mounted a camera and synched it to the motion detector. That done, he installed another motion detector and camera in less obvious locations and synched them. Usually, when someone found the first pair, which they were expecting, they wouldn’t look for the second. It was just human nature to say, “Ha! Found them,” when the real question should be, “Have I found all of them?”
The easiest way to kill someone on a planet and get away with it was to make it look like a mugging. Joy, the capital city of Bliss, wasn’t a particularly high-crime city, but it had its share. So one possible plan would be to get him off-base somehow.
Killing him at the Bliss Fleet HQ would also be possible, but present a much more difficult problem. First, it would have to be carried out by CSF personnel or some logged visitor with a reason to be there, not anonymous hired ruffians. Second, most areas of the base would likely be under camera surveillance, at least enough there would be a record of someone’s movements if not the actual crime scene.
Subtler methods – poisons, for example – were unlikely, because they were more exotic, less reliable, and detectable after the fact. They screamed that the murder was a hit, and not a random mugging.
Of course, depending on how well they did their background checks on him, someone trying to mug him could end up really surprised. Bill Campbell was accomplished at Enshin, a martial arts form that combined judo and karate and which dated back to pre-space Earth. It was popular in the CSF, being the preferred unarmed combat style with the Navy crowd and taught in the CSF Unarmed Combat School.
Enshin was in fact how he had met Jan Childers nine years ago, sparring in the gym at Sigurdsen Fleet Base on Jablonka. They were well-matched sparring partners, and stayed in practice. Even on this trip, they sparred every other day, as CSF capital ships had Enshin sparring mats in the gymnasium, where the lighter CSF units didn’t. In addition, during the long trips between planets, Campbell had sparred on the off days with other ship’s crew.
He had never competed for belts in Enshin, preferring to keep his actual level of proficiency rather less well documented, but he figured he was about a second-degree black belt, based on the ease or difficulty he had sparring with opponents who were belted at one level or another. And, a year into the Grand Tour, with one month spacing between planet assignments, he was in practice.
He locked his equipment case down with the rest of his luggage in the small closet and checked the time. He headed out to the officers mess and dinner, activating the motion detectors with a small remote as he left the cabin.
One of Bill Campbell’s assets as an operative was his ability to assume the air of an affable, bumbling sort, the kind of person who has been posted into a staff position where he could do little harm and was just idling along his time to retirement.
He was in that mode now, sitting in the officers mess, where he had been invited to sit with a number of senior officers for dinner.
“We know why Admiral Childers is here. What’s your mission, Admiral?” Commander Tristan Pascal asked, addressing Campbell as ‘Admiral’ because there could be only one ‘Captain’ on ship.
“He couldn’t tell you anyway, Tristan. Intelligence Division, after all,” Commander Neha Schuler said.
“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that,” Campbell said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We just have to have someone from Sigurdsen go out once in a while and make the rounds. Checking the boxes mostly. Stop in, say Hi, see if they need anything that’s not showing up in reports, look over the accounting. Hum-drum stuff.”
“With an Inspector’s badge?” Pascal asked.
Campbell looked down at his uniform, as if surprised to find an Inspector’s badge there.
“Oh, that. That’s just so I can chat with people without having to go through channels all the time. You know, I can just walk up to somebody and say ‘Hi’ without having to work through the chain of command. That really gets tedious.”
“You sure it doesn’t have something to do with the incursion several months back?”
“Oh, there was an incursion? Well, I left Sigurdsen a year ago with eight planets on my schedule, and I’m only half done, so I wouldn’t know anything about that. That’s Operations, anyway. Not my bailiwick.”
“Huh.” Pascal didn’t seem satisfied with that, but he let it drop and the rest of dinner was uneventful.
Campbell, though, made a mental note to look into the inquisitive Commander Pascal.
Bliss
When the shuttles from the Hannibal and the Belisarius landed at Bliss Fleet HQ, there was a bus waiting to take the instructional staff to the temporary quarters they had been assigned on base next to the training facility. There was also a ground car waiting, driven by a lieutenant commander wearing Intelligence Division badges. He came up as Campbell exited the shuttle.
“Captain Campbell?”
“Yes, I’m Campbell.”
“Lieutenant Commander Kyle Acheson, Sir. I’ve been assigned to be your aide. Get
you anything you need while on base. I can take you to your assigned quarters, Sir.”
“Excellent, Commander.”
Acheson took Campbell’s other two bags while Campbell carried his equipment case. They put them in the trunk of the car, then set off toward Flag Row.
Every CSF base had a Flag Row, an area of townhouses that served as temporary quarters for flag officers on assignment to the base. Senior Captains, with one star, were accommodated on Flag Row as space allowed, and were otherwise housed in Senior Officers Quarters, a notch down in the pecking order. Campbell, though, was companions with Rear Admiral Jan Childers, who would be spending significant time on planet over the next two months, and her priority put them in Flag Row, even if another Senior Captain had to be bumped.
“Rear Admiral Langford would like to meet with you as soon as you have an opportunity, Sir,” Acheson said over his shoulder as he drove.
“I had planned on checking in as soon as I settled in a bit.”
“And the planetary commander, Admiral Rao, would like you to stop by as well.”
“Of course,” Campbell said.
“I can make those appointments for you, Sir, whenever you want to set up times.”
“What’s the local time here, Commander?”
“It’s 15:45 right now, Sir,” Acheson said.
“How about we set those appointments up for tomorrow morning, then? Admiral Langford first, then Admiral Rao.”
“Of course, Sir. I’ll see to it and get back to you with times.”
“That will be fine.”
Campbell looked out the window as they drove across the base. It was all new, yet familiar. Every CSF planetary headquarters looked about the same. Given the whole planet to choose from, and the need for the base to be used for shuttle operations to and from fleet elements in orbit, they were all located in semitropical locations where there was little seasonal variation in the weather. Shuttle operations in snow and ice would have been awful, so the CSF picked its bases to avoid the need.
Campbell- The Problem With Bliss Page 2
