Citadel

by Marko Kloos

  “It is, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Edmund, would you get us some tea, please? And do activate the security field when you close the door.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” the orderly said and stepped out of the room. The door closed behind him, and the red indicator lights on the door panel flashed three times to show that the anti-eavesdropping security protocol was now in place.

  “Congratulations on your promotion,” Admiral Holmes said. “Commander was always my favorite rank. High enough up the ladder for a consequential command. Not so high up that most of your day is spent checking boxes on admin forms.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Dunstan replied. “I wasn’t expecting it so soon. I barely had the time in grade for the promotion.” He shifted a little in his chair and glanced down at his uniform to make sure it was still wrinkle-free.

  “You seem a little uncomfortable. Everything all right this morning?”

  “To be entirely frank with you, I wasn’t expecting to see the navy chief of operations this morning,” Dunstan replied. “I get a little jumpy when I am ushered into flag rank offices without warning. It usually means my day is about to become more complicated. No offense, Admiral.”

  Admiral Holmes chuckled.

  “None taken. Keep that healthy sense of paranoia. It’ll serve you well. But you can stop worrying. You’re not here for a dressing-down.”

  She touched a control on her tabletop, and a screen projection opened in front of her. He could see that it was an excerpt of his personnel file. The admiral flicked through the data and opened another screen next to the first one, this one a little smaller and overlapping his personnel data.

  “I’m sorry about Minotaur,” she said. “It’s a bad reward for her to be sent to the wreckers. But she did well. And so did you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Dunstan replied. “I brought back a broken frigate. I was hoping she could be fixed. But I was sure that if she did go out again, it wouldn’t be under me.”

  “I went through the after-action report with my deputy chief of operations and a few of my other people, Commander. Every one of us thought that you fought that ship as well as anyone could have hoped. You took on an enemy that was punching well above your weight class, and you fought them to a draw.”

  “We should have won that fight. We had a ship with new AI algorithms and a better Point Defense System. That fuzzhead cruiser hadn’t seen any updates since the war. And whatever crew they had over on that ship, they were still getting used to their jobs.”

  “That fuzzhead cruiser was almost three times your mass. And you were outgunned from the start. That ship was designed to kill ships like Minotaur. Now stop the modesty and accept that command thinks you did just fine in that fight. And your ballistic intercept saved Rhodia One. I don’t know if they told you yet, but the missile you destroyed had a nuclear payload as well.”

  The revelation gave Dunstan an unpleasant jolt. A nuclear detonation on Rhodia One would have obliterated the station and disabled or destroyed every ship docked there at the time. Almost forty thousand people perished on the ground when the second nuke hit close to the civilian arcology, but if the first one had hit the station, it would have killed fifty thousand more, crippled Rhodia’s civilian space trade, and wiped out a quarter of the navy.

  “We’re not looking good out there right now,” Admiral Holmes continued. She flicked aside the screen with his personnel file and brought up a strategic chart of the system.

  “We’re close to Hades and Pallas, so the transit lanes are as low energy as they’ve been in years. But we’re not really making use of that advantage because the navy has taken a defensive posture around Rhodia. We can’t keep a lid on the entire system, so we’ve decided to focus on the home sector. That nuclear strike threw everyone into a panic.”

  She magnified the view of the space around Rhodia, where the vast majority of red dots representing Rhodian Navy units was concentrated at the moment, guarding transit lanes and patrolling the space between them. But even this close to the planet, there was a lot of empty space between the little red dots.

  “Five years I’ve been warning people that we need more hulls to do our jobs. But the war’s over, and the Gretian fleet is gone,” the admiral said. “Warships cost a lot of money to run. Too big a target for budget hawks to leave alone. And now look at us. Trying to spread a knife tip of butter over a slice of bread. And gods forbid we leave any spot uncovered, or people start screaming and calling for heads to roll.”

  “That cruiser is still out there,” Dunstan said. “And so is that little stealth ship that launched the nukes. They’ll have a harder time getting close to Rhodia now. But if they want to get another missile or two through our defenses . . .”

  “You know as well as I do that it’s all just a matter of how willing you are to die to get the kill,” Admiral Holmes said.

  She pointed to the clusters of red icons that were concentrated near the transit lanes, where the Rhodian Navy now turned a bright light on anyone entering Rhodian space on the way to the planet.

  “Ship inspections take a lot of time and personnel. You know that. And I can’t help but think that this was the point of that attack. To make everyone panic and draw us back home.”

  “I’ve had the same thought,” Dunstan said. “It’s the only way that missile strike makes sense.”

  “We can’t lock down Rhodian space and patrol the transit lanes at the same time. Not with what we have right now. And the fewer ships we have out there, the more brazen the pirates get. Then the whole system gets destabilized. The Oceanians can look after their own space. So can the Acheroni. But that leaves a lot of empty space in between.”

  “What about the reserve fleet?” Dunstan asked. “I know they’re reactivating a lot of ships. It’s old wartime hardware, but it’s plenty to do merchant lane patrols.”

  “We’ve got hulls, Commander. We just don’t have enough people to crew them. You know the haircut the fleet got after the end of the war. It takes three months to pull an old frigate out of the boneyard and get her ready for action. It takes a year to train someone to serve on her. And that’s just the rank-and-file enlisted crew. We don’t have enough lieutenants and commanders around anymore. No space warfare officers, no engineers, no network specialists. It takes years to expand a fleet. The civilians think you can do it with the stroke of a pen.”

  Admiral Holmes sighed and turned off the screen with the chart projection.

  “But we still have a job to do. And I’m the chief of operations, so I get to figure out how to do it with what we have.”

  By the door, a warning tone sounded, and the red indicator lights on the security panel flashed.

  “Come in,” Admiral Holmes said. The door opened to admit the orderly, who was carrying a small tray with two teacups. He brought it over to the admiral’s desk and put it down carefully.

  “Thank you, Edmund. That will be all for a while.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The orderly left the room again, and the security lock reactivated. Even here at fleet HQ, there were different layers and magnitudes of secrecy, and just because someone was cleared for one layer didn’t mean they were fully trusted with the rest as well.

  “That brings me to you,” the admiral said. She offered a cup to Dunstan, and he took it with a nod of thanks. It was a fragrant Palladian tea with quite a bit of spice to it, enough to make his throat tickle a little.

  “You are a bit of a rarity right now. You’re a fully trained and experienced ship commander without a ship. And after what happened on your last deployment, there’s no doubt that you’re one of the best we have left. I’ve handpicked you for a special job.”

  “A special job,” Dunstan repeated.

  “I know, I know.” Admiral Holmes sipped her tea and made a satisfied little sound. “Whenever you hear that word from a superior, you know you’re about to get handed a shovel and pointed at a giant hill of shit.”

  Dunstan chuckl
ed at her blunt statement. The admiral looked like she was close to retirement age, and her gray hair and stocky build made her look a little matronly. But he could tell that despite her grandmotherly appearance, she was as blunt and straightforward as any officer he had met out in the fleet.

  “Well, I won’t lie to you. I am about to point you at a giant hill of shit. But I am about to hand you a very nice shovel.”

  His interest piqued, he put his teacup down and watched as she tapped away at her desk surface. The screen that opened above the desk a moment later showed the longitudinal profile of a spaceship hull. It looked utterly unfamiliar to Dunstan.

  “This is RNS Hecate,” the admiral said.

  Next to the ship profile, a short list of general parameters scrolled down the screen. The hull looked like nothing he had ever seen in the fleet. It wasn’t an elegant ship. No two lines on her seemed to meet at right angles. She had a blunt, wide cylindrical shape, but he could tell that the hull didn’t have the efficient, regular round or octagonal cross-section of most spaceships. Something about her shape seemed off, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it without examining the schematics in detail.

  “Hecate,” he repeated. “I’ve never heard of her. What class is she?”

  “You won’t have heard of her unless you have a level-one security clearance and a need to know. She’s the lead ship of her class. The only ship of her class,” the admiral added. “In the construction budget, she is listed as Multipurpose Corvette 212. We have two more on the way, but one’s still getting fitted out and the other one is a month past having her hull spine laid.”

  “That’s a 212 class,” Dunstan said. The sinking feeling from earlier had returned to the center of his stomach. “A two-thousand-ton hull, if I recall correctly. Lightly armed.”

  “Eighteen hundred tons, actually. Fifty-six meters long. Five officers and twenty-two enlisted.”

  “Minotaur was three times that mass,” Dunstan said. “I wasn’t hoping for a battlecruiser command, Admiral. But that’s a corvette hull. Corvettes aren’t built to stand up to capital ships. You know what’s still out there and waiting for us.”

  What am I going to do with that little nutshell against a heavy gun cruiser? he wanted to add.

  The chief of operations looked at Dunstan with a wry smile.

  “By all means, speak your mind, Commander. After all, you’ve worn the rank for—what, three full days now?”

  Dunstan felt his face flush. He considered his reply and bought himself an extra moment by taking another sip of tea.

  “No disrespect intended, ma’am. But a minute ago you were praising my performance, and now you’re putting me from a frigate into a corvette. Forgive me if it feels a bit like a demotion.”

  “Size doesn’t always matter, you know. And from your personnel file, I thought you would know not to make judgments on a situation until you have sufficient intel,” the admiral said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He put his teacup back onto the desk. “I did speak out of turn. My apologies.”

  Admiral Holmes increased the size of the screen in front of her and flicked the schematic of RNS Hecate around to send it into a slow spin around her dorsal axis. The ship had the mass and overall length of a corvette, but it didn’t really look like one. Corvettes had external arrays, weapon mounts, and all the other trimmings of a warship, just on a smaller scale. Hecate had no visible hatches, comms equipment, or gun mounts. As the model on the screen spun to show a stern-on view, he could see why her hull shape had looked strange to him at first glance.

  “Prismatic cross-section,” he said, more to himself than to the admiral. “That’s a stealth hull if I’ve ever seen one. What is this thing?”

  “When the war started, we had a lot of the same problems we have now. Too few hulls, too few people to crew them. And that was when the fleet was four times as big as it is now. So we started an accelerated building program. But you know that we could barely keep up with the attrition rate. It was bankrupting the Gretians, but it was killing us, too. After the war, the navy put a bunch of their best R & D brains in a room and had them figure out how to break the meat grinder. Go away from the arms race of bigger hulls, thicker armor, more missiles. Find a way to dominate the battle space other than bringing bigger guns to the fight.”

  Admiral Holmes leaned back in her chair and nodded at the screen.

  “They called it ‘Project Athena.’ That’s the result right there. The first ship wasn’t scheduled to be launched until next year. After the internment fleet incident, they put a lot of energy into getting her out early. She just came back from her shakedown cruise three days ago.”

  Dunstan studied the schematic as it kept up its slow rotation on the screen, trying to deduce her capabilities from the shape of the hull and the few external fixtures in evidence.

  “I’ve never heard of Project Athena. And I try to stay on top of the rumor mill.”

  “It was a little easier to keep this under wraps because it’s a small hull. It doesn’t get the attention that a new battleship would get. From what I understand, the hardest part was hiding the insane amounts of money we sank into this thing without anyone noticing. And trust me that we don’t want it noticed. Not even by the rest of the Alliance. If they knew what this ship can do, there would be discord.”

  “What can she do?” Dunstan asked.

  “She’s not a corvette, Commander. She’s an information warfare cruiser. She has the latest in electronic warfare gear. We designed her as a space control ship. She has the sharpest eyes and keenest hearing of any ship in the system. And she’s the most expensive ship in the navy, by a fair margin. One hundred tons of her mass are just the palladium for her AI processor. Her computing core can do more operations per millisecond than all the rest of the combined AIs of all the navy ships.”

  Dunstan sat up straight and looked at the hull schematic with new eyes.

  “There are a hundred tons of palladium in that ship?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Gods,” he said. Every warship had a few tons of palladium built into it, most of it used for the gravmag rotor at the nose of the ship that generated gravity whenever the ship wasn’t burning its drive at one g. The palladium that went into those rotors constituted a fair percentage of a warship’s construction costs, and salvaging palladium from destroyed warships had been a dangerous but highly lucrative business during the war. Dunstan did the math and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Ten billion ags,” he said. “Good gods. A battleship costs half that.”

  “And that’s just the material value of the palladium in the AI core and the data pathways. Throw in the costs for R & D and the construction, weapons systems and electronics . . . you get the scope of it. The total price tag was considerably higher. That’s why we only have one of these right now and not fifty. As it is, she just about eviscerated our budget for a few years.”

  Dunstan tried to reconcile the shape of the ship on the screen with its monetary value. Palladium was used in small quantities all over the system. Whittling down the amounts of it needed for any product was the most important part of the design process. A comtab had just a gram or two, and consolidating the pathways to shave off half a gram could save hundreds of millions on the cost of manufacture. A hundred tons of palladium was an obscene amount. A merchant known to carry that much of it would be the juiciest piracy target in the system, and Dunstan would not put it past most of the planetary governments to try to claim it as well.

  “And you want me to command her,” he said. “I didn’t even know that ship existed until just now. I don’t know her layout, her capabilities. And if she just got back from her shakedown cruise, her crew barely had time to get familiar with her.”

  “I know you’re a quick learner, Commander,” Admiral Holmes said. “And you’ll have an excellent first officer to show you the ropes.”

  “What about her current commander?”

  “He had to take medical
leave. I do not have the time to wait for him because I need that ship out there right now. That means you’ll have to jump in and take over. I realize I’m making you hit the ground running. Your first officer knows the ship. I want someone in charge who knows how to fight. Who has shown they can keep their head when it counts.”

  Dunstan looked from the admiral to the schematic of RNS Hecate, which was still spinning in the space above the admiral’s desk to show off all her angles. It seemed risky to take responsibility of a ship that was unknown to him, brand new, and unproven in battle. But there was a sort of excitement in the challenge—to be trusted with the most expensive unit in the navy. If the admiral wasn’t overselling the Hecate’s capabilities, she had the potential to be a much greater force against the insurgency than any destroyer or cruiser they could hand him.

  I knew that shiny new stripe would come with a shiny new cart to pull uphill, he thought.

  “If that’s where the navy needs me, that’s what I’ll do,” he said.

  Admiral Holmes rewarded his statement with a satisfied nod.

  “Very well, Commander. I’ll have the data for your new command sent to you so you can familiarize with her as much as you can before you take over.”

  “How much time do I have?” Dunstan asked.

  “The crew are on their two-week leave. I thought about cutting their leave short, but I need a fresh and motivated contingent for Hecate’s first combat patrol. You have a week to prepare.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ll make the best of it.”

  “I know you will.”

  Dunstan got out of his chair and straightened his uniform.

  “I appreciate your confidence in me. I’ll do my best to live up to the navy’s expectations.”

  Admiral Holmes turned off her screen, and the schematic of RNS Hecate disappeared. Then she touched a control on her table, and a few moments later, the security light blinked and her orderly entered the room. Dunstan put his cap under his arm and walked over to the door.