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At least as long as I don't make the mistake of rubbing his face in something my staff and I shouldn't be doing... like Megan's warning me Ransom was coming. There's a limit to what he can ignore.
"Have we heard anything from Citizen Committee-woman Ransom?" LePic asked after a moment. Even he found the title a bit cumbersome, but he got it out gamely.
"I don't believe so, Sir," Theisman replied, and raised an eyebrow at his ops officer. "Have we heard anything from Tepes, Warner?"
"Only routine contact with System Control, Citizen Admiral," Caslet said.
"I see. Thank you, Citizen Commander." LePic nodded gravely to Caslet. He'd entertained some doubts about the citizen commander originally, yet Caslet had proven himself to LePic's satisfaction since arriving on Theisman's staff. It was a pity he was under a cloud with higher authority, but LePic was doing his best to rehabilitate him in his confidential reports. Of course, one had to do that sort of thing slowly and carefully.
The peoples commissioner turned back to the plot, watching the battlecruiser move slowly nearer, and hid a sigh as he evaluated the mood of the others in the War Room. It was difficult to get a true read on the emotions behind an experienced officers professional mien, but LePic had gotten ample practice over the last six years, and what he sensed disappointed him. He was too self-honest to pretend it wasn't inevitable, yet it saddened him that the Republics officers should feel near universal distaste, if not overt dread and hatred, for a member of the Committee of Public Safety itself.
She was shorter than he'd thought.
Theisman felt a flicker of surprise at the prosaic nature of his own observation as Cordelia Ransom stepped into his office. It seemed so... inappropriate, somehow, to think about a thing like that at a time like this. Yet it was true, and as he rose to greet her, it occurred to him that his surprise might say something significant about her. Her HD appearances had led him to expect someone at least ten centimeters taller, and it must have taken careful camera work and editing to create that impression. That sort of trick wasn't complicated, but it didn't happen by accident, and he wondered why it was important to her.
Her eyes were as blue as his own, though darker. They were also much colder and flatter than they appeared on HD, but that, at least, was no surprise. Unfortunately. Different personalities sought power for different reasons, and it gave him very little satisfaction to realize he'd been right about what had driven Ransom to seek it, but he could hardly call it a surprise.
Two hulking bodyguards in civilian clothing, not SS uniform, followed her into the office. Theisman was willing to bet they'd been picked more for mass than brainpower, and they radiated the focus and ferocity of well-trained Rottweilers. Their eyes swept the room like targeting lasers, and one of them crossed wordlessly to the door to the attached executive head. He opened it and gave the spotless bathroom a quick look, then closed the door and returned to join his fellow. They stationed themselves on either side of the door, each with one hand slightly cocked, as if ready to dart inside his unsealed tunic at a moments notice, and an utterly incurious expression.
"Citizen Committeewoman," Theisman said, reaching out to take her hand as her guards settled into place. "Welcome to the Barnett System. I trust you'll enjoy your visit."
"Thank you, Citizen Admiral," she replied. Her small hand felt inappropriately warm and delicate for the spokeswoman for the Committee of Public Safety's terrorism. Theisman’s subconscious had expected it to feel cold and clawlike, but it didn't, and she smiled at him. Which, if she was trying to charm him, was a mistake. She was an attractive woman in many ways, yet coupled with those flat blue eyes, the small, white teeth her smile exposed made Theisman think of a Thalassian neoshark.
"Please, call me 'Citizen Secretary,'" she added. "I'm here in my role as Secretary of Public Information, after all, not on some sort of formal fact-finding mission, and it's so much less awkward sounding than 'Citizen Committeewoman,' don't you think?"
And you can believe as much of that "not on some sort of fact-finding mission" as you like, Thomas my boy, Theisman thought sardonically.
"As you wish, Citizen Secretary," was all he said, and something like amusement glittered in those cold eyes as she gave his hand one last squeeze and released it.
"Thank you," she said, and glanced around the office. A raised eyebrow was her only comment on its somewhat worn opulence, and she allowed herself a gracious air as she settled into the chair Theisman indicated. She leaned back and crossed her legs, and he took a facing chair rather than returning to the one behind his desk. It wouldn't do to do anything that could be construed as an effort to assert his own authority, after all.
"Would you care for some refreshment, Citizen Secretary? I hope you'll join Citizen Commissioner LePic, the senior members of my staff, and myself for supper shortly, but if you'd care for anything in the meantime... ?"
"No, thank you, Citizen Admiral. I appreciate the offer, but I'm fine."
"As you wish," he repeated, settling back in his own chair with a politely attentive expression, and more amusement flickered in her eyes. His expectant silence was its own form of defensive social judo. It was courteous enough, but keeping his mouth shut was also the best way of making certain he kept his foot out of it, and this was one conversation in which even a minor faux pas could have major consequences. She seemed to enjoy his wariness, and she let the silence linger for several seconds before she spoke again.
"I suppose you're wondering exactly what I'm here for, Citizen Admiral," she said at last, and he gave a small shrug.
"I assume that you'll tell me anything I need to know in order to meet your needs, Citizen Secretary," he replied.
"Indeed I will," she said. Then she cocked her head to one side. "Tell me, Citizen Admiral. Were you surprised when I asked to meet you alone?"
Theisman considered pointing out that they were not, in fact, alone, but she clearly regarded her bodyguards as mobile pieces of furniture, not people. He also considered playing fat, dumb, and happy, but not very seriously. A man with no brains didn't make it to the rank of full admiral, even in the PRH, and trying to pretend otherwise, especially with this woman, would be not only stupid but dangerous.
"Actually," he admitted, "I was a bit surprised. I'm simply the system's military commander under Citizen Commissioner LePic’s direction, and I suppose I assumed that you'd want to speak to him, as well."
"I do," she told him, "and I will. But that will be largely as a member of the Committee, and I wanted to speak to you as head of Public Information. That's the main reason I've come all the way out here, and I need your advice as well as your assistance."
"My advice, Ma'am?" An edge of genuine surprise leaked into Theisman’s tone before he could stop it, and her eyes gleamed.
"As I'm sure you're aware, Citizen Admiral, we've been on the defensive virtually since this war began. Not that it's the fault of our heroic Navy and Marines, of course," she said, and paused, smiling another of those thin smiles. But Theisman only waited, refusing to rise to the bait, if bait was what it was, and she went on after a few seconds.
"The corrupt, imperialistic ambitions and incompetence of the Legislaturalist oppressors combined to betray the Republic on both the domestic and the military fronts," she said. "Domestically, they systematically impoverished the People for their own greedy ends and to support the machinery of oppression needed to suppress resistance to their ruthless exploitation of the People. Militarily, their criminal overconfidence led them into the initial disasters on the frontier which squandered our original numerical superiority and allowed the enemy to throw our courageous fighting forces back in disarray. Would you agree with that analysis, Citizen Admiral?"
"I'm scarcely the best person to ask about domestic affairs, Ma'am," Theisman replied after a moment. "As you may know, I was raised in a creche, and I went straight into the Navy out of high school, so I never really worked in the civilian sector and I have no close family. In a sense, I suppose, you might say I've always been in the service of the state one way or another, without much of a personal experience basis from which to evaluate conditions in civilian society. And I haven't been back to Haven, except on Navy business, in fifteen T-years, which, I'm sorry to say, hasn't given me the opportunity to see how conditions have changed since the coup."
"I see." Ransom steepled her fingers under her chin and arched her eyebrows. Apparently she'd decided to be amused by Theisman's carefully phrased evasions, for which he was grateful, but she wasn't prepared to let him completely off the hook. "I don't suppose I ever really realized how, um, sheltered a naval career could be, in a social sense, I mean," she said slowly. "But perhaps it's just as well. It should give you an even greater insight into the military aspects of my analysis, shouldn't it?"
"I'd certainly hope so, Citizen Secretary!" Theisman responded vigorously in his relief at having gotten out of perjuring himself over his own opinion on the relative oppressiveness of the Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety.
"Good! Then tell me how you think we got into this mess," Ransom invited, and she sounded so sincerely curious that Theisman almost answered her candidly. But even as he opened his mouth, that cold flatness in her eyes hit him like a splash of ice water. This woman was even more dangerous than he'd thought, he realized. He knew how perilous answering her honestly could, would, be, yet she'd almost sucked him into doing just that. And she'd made it look so easy.
"Well, Ma'am," he said after the briefest of pauses, "I'm not as gifted with words as you are, so I hope you'll forgive me if I speak bluntly?" He paused once more until she nodded, then went on. "In that case, Citizen Secretary, and speaking bluntly, the military 'mess' we're in is so deep that picking a single cause, or even the most important group of causes, for it is extremely difficult. Certainly our prewar officers' planning and their faulty execution of the war's opening operations are major factors. As you yourself suggested, we began the war with a substantial numerical advantage which was frittered away in the opening battles. That was compounded by the Manties' superior weapon systems, and I'd have to say that the failure to recognize our technological inferiority and delay operations until we'd attained at least parity was the direct responsibility of the prewar government and officer corps. Our intelligence services obviously came up short, as well, given their failure to correctly project the Manties' initial deployments... not to mention their failure to detect and prevent the Harris Assassination."
He paused again, lips pursed as if to consider what he'd said, then shrugged.
"I suppose what I'm trying to say, Citizen Secretary, is that our present military difficulties are the product of everything that preceded them, and that the disastrous way the war opened, plus the confusion engendered by the Harris Assassination, paved the way for everything else. So, yes, on that basis I'd have to agree that incompetence and stupidity on the part of the old officer corps and our political leadership are to blame."
"I see," Ransom repeated, and Theisman held his breath, for his final sentence had come much closer to candor than he'd intended. The old officer corps had blundered badly in the opening phases of the war, but the People's Navy had suffered its heaviest losses only after the Legislaturalist admirals had been massacred or driven into exile. It had been the confusion and fear as the purges began which allowed the Manties to really cut the Fleet to pieces, and those things were hardly the fault of the Legislaturalists, most of whom had been dead at the time. But, then again, he hadn't laid the blame on the prewar political leadership, and he devoutly hoped that Ransom wouldn't notice.
Apparently, she didn't. She sat there, gazing at him while she considered what he'd said, then nodded and leaned slightly forward.
"I'm glad to see that you have a realistic grasp of how we got where we are, Citizen Admiral," she said. "It encourages me to believe that you also understand what we have to do to dig ourselves out of our current difficulties."
"I can think of several things I'd like to see done from a military perspective," Theisman said cautiously. "Not all of them are possible, of course, particularly in light of our heavy losses to date. But I'm not really qualified to offer advice on economic or social policies, Ma'am, and I'm afraid I'd feel presumptuous if I made the effort."
"It's good to meet someone who recognizes the limitations of his own experience," Ransom replied so smoothly that her silken tone almost, almost, concealed the dagger at its heart. Theisman felt a moment of fear, but then she smiled and sat back once more, and he relaxed in relief. "I think, though, Citizen Admiral, that I can show you how your command here in Barnett can have a direct impact on those social and economic questions. And, of course, on the direct, immediate military conduct of the war."
"I'm certainly prepared to do anything I can to serve the Republic, Ma'am."
"I'm sure you are, Citizen Admiral. I'm sure you are." Ransom ran one hand over her golden hair, and when she resumed, her voice had taken on a seriousness, an earnestness, which Theisman hadn't really been prepared to hear from her.
"Basically, it comes down to morale," she said. "I'm not going to suggest that morale can overcome enormous material odds. All the courage and determination in the universe won't mystically enable a mob armed with rocks to overcome trained infantry in battle armor, and you wouldn't believe me if I told you it could, now would you?"
"Probably not, Ma'am," Theisman admitted, bemused by the shift in her emphasis and intensity.
"Of course not. But if you want to arm people with something better than rocks, you have to buy or build their weapons. And if you want them to use those weapons properly, you have to motivate them. You have to convince your civilians that their military will use the weapons they're given effectively if you expect those civilians to dig in and build the weapons in the first place. And you have to convince your military personnel that they can win if you expect them to risk their lives. Correct?"
"I certainly can't argue with any of that, Citizen Secretary."
"Good! Because you, Citizen Admiral, are one of the unfortunately few flag officers who have actually done that, won battles, I mean, and that's why I'm here. It's vital for Public Information to get the message that we have admirals who can win across to the civilians. And it's almost equally important to show both the civilians and our military how vital it is to hold systems like Barnett. That's why my technical people will be shooting a great deal of footage over the next few weeks. I'll assume responsibility, in conjunction with Citizen Commissioner LePic, for any censorship which may be required by operational security concerns, so please instruct your officers to cooperate by answering questions as fully as possible in terms laymen can understand."
"I'll be happy to instruct them to cooperate with you, Ma'am," Theisman said. "But if the footage you shoot is for public broadcast, I'd like to have some input into the security concerns you just mentioned. I'm sure the Manties watch our media as closely as we watch theirs, and I'd hate to give them any clues as to our dispositions here."
"Of course we'll consult you in that regard," Ransom assured him. "The main thing, though, is to be certain that the entire operation is properly handled. Information is another weapon, Citizen Admiral. It must be deployed and managed in such a way as to have the maximum possible effect, and that's why I decided to come to Barnett in person. Obviously, I have a great many responsibilities to the Committee and the Republic over and above those of the Ministry of Public Information. But to be completely honest, I feel Public Information is the most important job I have. That's why I'm here, and I hope I can count on you and your people to help me with my job."
"Of course, Citizen Secretary. I'll be delighted to assist however I can, and I'm certain I speak for every officer here in Barnett," Theisman assured her. We'd better, anyway, if we want to avoid firing squads, he added silently, and smiled at her.
"Thank you, Citizen Admiral. I appreciate that." Ransom returned his smile with interest. "And I assure you that Public Information will make the best possible use of our time here," she added.
Chapter Fourteen
"Have we heard anything from Citizen Committee-woman Ransom?" LePic asked after a moment. Even he found the title a bit cumbersome, but he got it out gamely.
"I don't believe so, Sir," Theisman replied, and raised an eyebrow at his ops officer. "Have we heard anything from Tepes, Warner?"
"Only routine contact with System Control, Citizen Admiral," Caslet said.
"I see. Thank you, Citizen Commander." LePic nodded gravely to Caslet. He'd entertained some doubts about the citizen commander originally, yet Caslet had proven himself to LePic's satisfaction since arriving on Theisman's staff. It was a pity he was under a cloud with higher authority, but LePic was doing his best to rehabilitate him in his confidential reports. Of course, one had to do that sort of thing slowly and carefully.
The peoples commissioner turned back to the plot, watching the battlecruiser move slowly nearer, and hid a sigh as he evaluated the mood of the others in the War Room. It was difficult to get a true read on the emotions behind an experienced officers professional mien, but LePic had gotten ample practice over the last six years, and what he sensed disappointed him. He was too self-honest to pretend it wasn't inevitable, yet it saddened him that the Republics officers should feel near universal distaste, if not overt dread and hatred, for a member of the Committee of Public Safety itself.
She was shorter than he'd thought.
Theisman felt a flicker of surprise at the prosaic nature of his own observation as Cordelia Ransom stepped into his office. It seemed so... inappropriate, somehow, to think about a thing like that at a time like this. Yet it was true, and as he rose to greet her, it occurred to him that his surprise might say something significant about her. Her HD appearances had led him to expect someone at least ten centimeters taller, and it must have taken careful camera work and editing to create that impression. That sort of trick wasn't complicated, but it didn't happen by accident, and he wondered why it was important to her.
Her eyes were as blue as his own, though darker. They were also much colder and flatter than they appeared on HD, but that, at least, was no surprise. Unfortunately. Different personalities sought power for different reasons, and it gave him very little satisfaction to realize he'd been right about what had driven Ransom to seek it, but he could hardly call it a surprise.
Two hulking bodyguards in civilian clothing, not SS uniform, followed her into the office. Theisman was willing to bet they'd been picked more for mass than brainpower, and they radiated the focus and ferocity of well-trained Rottweilers. Their eyes swept the room like targeting lasers, and one of them crossed wordlessly to the door to the attached executive head. He opened it and gave the spotless bathroom a quick look, then closed the door and returned to join his fellow. They stationed themselves on either side of the door, each with one hand slightly cocked, as if ready to dart inside his unsealed tunic at a moments notice, and an utterly incurious expression.
"Citizen Committeewoman," Theisman said, reaching out to take her hand as her guards settled into place. "Welcome to the Barnett System. I trust you'll enjoy your visit."
"Thank you, Citizen Admiral," she replied. Her small hand felt inappropriately warm and delicate for the spokeswoman for the Committee of Public Safety's terrorism. Theisman’s subconscious had expected it to feel cold and clawlike, but it didn't, and she smiled at him. Which, if she was trying to charm him, was a mistake. She was an attractive woman in many ways, yet coupled with those flat blue eyes, the small, white teeth her smile exposed made Theisman think of a Thalassian neoshark.
"Please, call me 'Citizen Secretary,'" she added. "I'm here in my role as Secretary of Public Information, after all, not on some sort of formal fact-finding mission, and it's so much less awkward sounding than 'Citizen Committeewoman,' don't you think?"
And you can believe as much of that "not on some sort of fact-finding mission" as you like, Thomas my boy, Theisman thought sardonically.
"As you wish, Citizen Secretary," was all he said, and something like amusement glittered in those cold eyes as she gave his hand one last squeeze and released it.
"Thank you," she said, and glanced around the office. A raised eyebrow was her only comment on its somewhat worn opulence, and she allowed herself a gracious air as she settled into the chair Theisman indicated. She leaned back and crossed her legs, and he took a facing chair rather than returning to the one behind his desk. It wouldn't do to do anything that could be construed as an effort to assert his own authority, after all.
"Would you care for some refreshment, Citizen Secretary? I hope you'll join Citizen Commissioner LePic, the senior members of my staff, and myself for supper shortly, but if you'd care for anything in the meantime... ?"
"No, thank you, Citizen Admiral. I appreciate the offer, but I'm fine."
"As you wish," he repeated, settling back in his own chair with a politely attentive expression, and more amusement flickered in her eyes. His expectant silence was its own form of defensive social judo. It was courteous enough, but keeping his mouth shut was also the best way of making certain he kept his foot out of it, and this was one conversation in which even a minor faux pas could have major consequences. She seemed to enjoy his wariness, and she let the silence linger for several seconds before she spoke again.
"I suppose you're wondering exactly what I'm here for, Citizen Admiral," she said at last, and he gave a small shrug.
"I assume that you'll tell me anything I need to know in order to meet your needs, Citizen Secretary," he replied.
"Indeed I will," she said. Then she cocked her head to one side. "Tell me, Citizen Admiral. Were you surprised when I asked to meet you alone?"
Theisman considered pointing out that they were not, in fact, alone, but she clearly regarded her bodyguards as mobile pieces of furniture, not people. He also considered playing fat, dumb, and happy, but not very seriously. A man with no brains didn't make it to the rank of full admiral, even in the PRH, and trying to pretend otherwise, especially with this woman, would be not only stupid but dangerous.
"Actually," he admitted, "I was a bit surprised. I'm simply the system's military commander under Citizen Commissioner LePic’s direction, and I suppose I assumed that you'd want to speak to him, as well."
"I do," she told him, "and I will. But that will be largely as a member of the Committee, and I wanted to speak to you as head of Public Information. That's the main reason I've come all the way out here, and I need your advice as well as your assistance."
"My advice, Ma'am?" An edge of genuine surprise leaked into Theisman’s tone before he could stop it, and her eyes gleamed.
"As I'm sure you're aware, Citizen Admiral, we've been on the defensive virtually since this war began. Not that it's the fault of our heroic Navy and Marines, of course," she said, and paused, smiling another of those thin smiles. But Theisman only waited, refusing to rise to the bait, if bait was what it was, and she went on after a few seconds.
"The corrupt, imperialistic ambitions and incompetence of the Legislaturalist oppressors combined to betray the Republic on both the domestic and the military fronts," she said. "Domestically, they systematically impoverished the People for their own greedy ends and to support the machinery of oppression needed to suppress resistance to their ruthless exploitation of the People. Militarily, their criminal overconfidence led them into the initial disasters on the frontier which squandered our original numerical superiority and allowed the enemy to throw our courageous fighting forces back in disarray. Would you agree with that analysis, Citizen Admiral?"
"I'm scarcely the best person to ask about domestic affairs, Ma'am," Theisman replied after a moment. "As you may know, I was raised in a creche, and I went straight into the Navy out of high school, so I never really worked in the civilian sector and I have no close family. In a sense, I suppose, you might say I've always been in the service of the state one way or another, without much of a personal experience basis from which to evaluate conditions in civilian society. And I haven't been back to Haven, except on Navy business, in fifteen T-years, which, I'm sorry to say, hasn't given me the opportunity to see how conditions have changed since the coup."
"I see." Ransom steepled her fingers under her chin and arched her eyebrows. Apparently she'd decided to be amused by Theisman's carefully phrased evasions, for which he was grateful, but she wasn't prepared to let him completely off the hook. "I don't suppose I ever really realized how, um, sheltered a naval career could be, in a social sense, I mean," she said slowly. "But perhaps it's just as well. It should give you an even greater insight into the military aspects of my analysis, shouldn't it?"
"I'd certainly hope so, Citizen Secretary!" Theisman responded vigorously in his relief at having gotten out of perjuring himself over his own opinion on the relative oppressiveness of the Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety.
"Good! Then tell me how you think we got into this mess," Ransom invited, and she sounded so sincerely curious that Theisman almost answered her candidly. But even as he opened his mouth, that cold flatness in her eyes hit him like a splash of ice water. This woman was even more dangerous than he'd thought, he realized. He knew how perilous answering her honestly could, would, be, yet she'd almost sucked him into doing just that. And she'd made it look so easy.
"Well, Ma'am," he said after the briefest of pauses, "I'm not as gifted with words as you are, so I hope you'll forgive me if I speak bluntly?" He paused once more until she nodded, then went on. "In that case, Citizen Secretary, and speaking bluntly, the military 'mess' we're in is so deep that picking a single cause, or even the most important group of causes, for it is extremely difficult. Certainly our prewar officers' planning and their faulty execution of the war's opening operations are major factors. As you yourself suggested, we began the war with a substantial numerical advantage which was frittered away in the opening battles. That was compounded by the Manties' superior weapon systems, and I'd have to say that the failure to recognize our technological inferiority and delay operations until we'd attained at least parity was the direct responsibility of the prewar government and officer corps. Our intelligence services obviously came up short, as well, given their failure to correctly project the Manties' initial deployments... not to mention their failure to detect and prevent the Harris Assassination."
He paused again, lips pursed as if to consider what he'd said, then shrugged.
"I suppose what I'm trying to say, Citizen Secretary, is that our present military difficulties are the product of everything that preceded them, and that the disastrous way the war opened, plus the confusion engendered by the Harris Assassination, paved the way for everything else. So, yes, on that basis I'd have to agree that incompetence and stupidity on the part of the old officer corps and our political leadership are to blame."
"I see," Ransom repeated, and Theisman held his breath, for his final sentence had come much closer to candor than he'd intended. The old officer corps had blundered badly in the opening phases of the war, but the People's Navy had suffered its heaviest losses only after the Legislaturalist admirals had been massacred or driven into exile. It had been the confusion and fear as the purges began which allowed the Manties to really cut the Fleet to pieces, and those things were hardly the fault of the Legislaturalists, most of whom had been dead at the time. But, then again, he hadn't laid the blame on the prewar political leadership, and he devoutly hoped that Ransom wouldn't notice.
Apparently, she didn't. She sat there, gazing at him while she considered what he'd said, then nodded and leaned slightly forward.
"I'm glad to see that you have a realistic grasp of how we got where we are, Citizen Admiral," she said. "It encourages me to believe that you also understand what we have to do to dig ourselves out of our current difficulties."
"I can think of several things I'd like to see done from a military perspective," Theisman said cautiously. "Not all of them are possible, of course, particularly in light of our heavy losses to date. But I'm not really qualified to offer advice on economic or social policies, Ma'am, and I'm afraid I'd feel presumptuous if I made the effort."
"It's good to meet someone who recognizes the limitations of his own experience," Ransom replied so smoothly that her silken tone almost, almost, concealed the dagger at its heart. Theisman felt a moment of fear, but then she smiled and sat back once more, and he relaxed in relief. "I think, though, Citizen Admiral, that I can show you how your command here in Barnett can have a direct impact on those social and economic questions. And, of course, on the direct, immediate military conduct of the war."
"I'm certainly prepared to do anything I can to serve the Republic, Ma'am."
"I'm sure you are, Citizen Admiral. I'm sure you are." Ransom ran one hand over her golden hair, and when she resumed, her voice had taken on a seriousness, an earnestness, which Theisman hadn't really been prepared to hear from her.
"Basically, it comes down to morale," she said. "I'm not going to suggest that morale can overcome enormous material odds. All the courage and determination in the universe won't mystically enable a mob armed with rocks to overcome trained infantry in battle armor, and you wouldn't believe me if I told you it could, now would you?"
"Probably not, Ma'am," Theisman admitted, bemused by the shift in her emphasis and intensity.
"Of course not. But if you want to arm people with something better than rocks, you have to buy or build their weapons. And if you want them to use those weapons properly, you have to motivate them. You have to convince your civilians that their military will use the weapons they're given effectively if you expect those civilians to dig in and build the weapons in the first place. And you have to convince your military personnel that they can win if you expect them to risk their lives. Correct?"
"I certainly can't argue with any of that, Citizen Secretary."
"Good! Because you, Citizen Admiral, are one of the unfortunately few flag officers who have actually done that, won battles, I mean, and that's why I'm here. It's vital for Public Information to get the message that we have admirals who can win across to the civilians. And it's almost equally important to show both the civilians and our military how vital it is to hold systems like Barnett. That's why my technical people will be shooting a great deal of footage over the next few weeks. I'll assume responsibility, in conjunction with Citizen Commissioner LePic, for any censorship which may be required by operational security concerns, so please instruct your officers to cooperate by answering questions as fully as possible in terms laymen can understand."
"I'll be happy to instruct them to cooperate with you, Ma'am," Theisman said. "But if the footage you shoot is for public broadcast, I'd like to have some input into the security concerns you just mentioned. I'm sure the Manties watch our media as closely as we watch theirs, and I'd hate to give them any clues as to our dispositions here."
"Of course we'll consult you in that regard," Ransom assured him. "The main thing, though, is to be certain that the entire operation is properly handled. Information is another weapon, Citizen Admiral. It must be deployed and managed in such a way as to have the maximum possible effect, and that's why I decided to come to Barnett in person. Obviously, I have a great many responsibilities to the Committee and the Republic over and above those of the Ministry of Public Information. But to be completely honest, I feel Public Information is the most important job I have. That's why I'm here, and I hope I can count on you and your people to help me with my job."
"Of course, Citizen Secretary. I'll be delighted to assist however I can, and I'm certain I speak for every officer here in Barnett," Theisman assured her. We'd better, anyway, if we want to avoid firing squads, he added silently, and smiled at her.
"Thank you, Citizen Admiral. I appreciate that." Ransom returned his smile with interest. "And I assure you that Public Information will make the best possible use of our time here," she added.
Chapter Fourteen
"All right, Commander. What's so damned urgent?"
Vice Admiral of the Red Dame Madeleine Sorbanne wasted no time on pleasantries, and her expression, as brusque as her tone, made it clear she had better things to waste her time on than courtesy calls from newly arriving starship captains who refused to take her yeoman's "no" for an answer. The petite admiral had only half-risen to offer a perfunctory handshake, and she flopped back into the chair behind her desk even as she spoke. That desk, unusually littered with data chips and folders of hardcopy, lacked the spartan neatness that was the RMN’s ideal, and Sorbanne's short, white-stranded mahogany-red hair looked as if she were in the habit of running her fingers through it while she fretted.
Well, Dame Madeleine had plenty of excuses for her desk's untidiness... and any fretting she happened to be doing, Jessica Dorcett reminded herself. As the senior officer on Clairmont Station, Sorbanne had seen half her capital ship strength siphoned off to build up Eighth Fleet, but no one had bothered to reduce her command area or responsibilities to reflect her lower strength. And with all the comings and goings leading up to Earl White Havens eventual advance on Barnett, the bustling confusion of Clairmont’s local and through traffic must be enough to try the patience of a saint. Of course, no one had ever nominated Dame Madeleine for canonization, and Dorcett's request for an immediate personal meeting had clearly ticked her off.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your schedule, Ma'am," the commander said now. She ignored the admiral's gestured invitation to take a seat of her own, choosing to remain standing at parade rest instead, and saw Sorbanne's eyebrows rise in surprise. "Under the circumstances, however, I thought that I should make my report directly to you."
"What report?" Some of the irritation faded from Sorbanne's tone. Her reputation for irascibility was exceeded only by her reputation for competence, and crispness diluted her testiness as Dorcett’s strained expression began to register fully. The commander hesitated just a moment, then drew a deep breath and took the plunge.
"Admiral, we've lost Adler," she said, and Sorbanne's chair snapped suddenly upright. The admiral leaned forward, and her high-cheekboned face lost all expression, as if Dorcett had cast a magic spell.
"How?" she asked harshly, and the commander shook her head.
"I don't have all the details, Windsong was too far out for good tactical imagery, but I'm afraid the bare bones were pretty clear. We screwed up, Ma'am, and whoever planned the Peeps' attack had the guts and the smarts to take advantage of it." Dorcett didn't like saying that, yet it had to be said, and her own anger, and shame, made her voice come out flat.
"Explain." Sorbanne sounded as if she were regaining her mental balance, and Dorcett wondered how much of that was real and how much was acting ability.
"Commodore Yeargin had too few sensor platforms for complete coverage, Ma'am, so she placed what she did have to cover the most obvious approach vectors. Then she put her main force into Samovar orbit... and aside from detaching my destroyer division to cover the main asteroid processing node, she posted no pickets at all." Despite iron self-control, Sorbanne winced, and Dorcett went grimly on. "The Peeps came in from above the system ecliptic, which let them skirt the Commodores platforms and avoid my command's sensor envelope entirely And they also came in ballistic."
"Peeps came in ballistic?" Sorbanne repeated carefully, and Dorcett nodded.
"Yes, Ma'am. They must have. Either that, or their stealth systems have achieved a much higher degree of improvement than ONI's been projecting. Even on the course they followed, they should have passed close enough to at least one of our sensor platforms for active impellers to've been detected."
"They came in powered down all the way to attack range?" Sorbanne still seemed to be having trouble with the concept, and Dorcett nodded again.
"Yes, Ma'am. And I'm afraid that isn't all." Sorbanne eyed her narrowly and made a "tell me more" gesture, and Dorcett sighed. "They used missile pods, Admiral," she said quietly.
"Shit." The soft, whispered expletive was almost a prayer, and Sorbanne closed her eyes. She sat that way for several seconds, then opened them and looked at Dorcett once more. "What's the Peep strength in the system?"
"I'm not certain, Ma'am. As I say, we were too far out for really good scans, but my best estimate is four battlecruisers, six to eight heavy cruisers, and half a dozen light cruisers. My tac officer and I saw no destroyers, but I can't guarantee there weren't any."
Sorbanne winced again, this time at the disparity in weight of broadside Dorcett's estimate suggested, especially if the Peeps had, indeed, used missile pods.
"How bad were Commodore Yeargin's losses?" she asked after a moment.
"Ma'am, I..." Dorcett stopped and swallowed. "I'm sorry, Admiral. I must have been... unclear." She inhaled, then went on very flatly. "Aside from my division, the task group’s losses were total, Dame Madeleine. I'm... the senior surviving officer."
Sorbanne didn't say a word. She only sat there for endless, aching seconds, staring at Dorcett while her mind raced. The news that the Peeps had finally deployed missile pods was unwelcome and frightening, but hardly unexpected. Every thinking officer had known the enemy had to be working at full stretch to overcome the huge advantage the Allies' pod monopoly had conferred upon them. But having the long-awaited weapons employed so competently and to such crushing effect by the despised Peeps... that was unexpected. And the moral shock was far more than merely frightening.
Madeleine Sorbanne leaned slowly back in her chair once more, still staring at Dorcett, but she wasn't really seeing the commander. She was seeing another woman's face and thinking about Frances Yeargin and her command. Yeargin always was an arrogant, overconfident bitch, she thought slowly, remembering the dead commodore and her oft expressed contempt for the People's Navy. Damn it, she knew she was short of platforms! The woman should have had at least some pickets out, for God's sake! What the hell did she think she was stationed there for?
But what Yeargin had been thinking was immaterial now. Rightly or wrongly, the future was going to condemn her even more harshly than Sorbanne did now, for never in its entire history, had the RMN suffered a disaster like this... until now. An entire generation of analysts would examine every tiny facet of the Battle of Adler, apportioning blame and assigning guilt with twenty-twenty hindsight and the fine ruthlessness of people who'd never been there, and that was just as immaterial right now as what Yeargin had been thinking. What mattered was that her entire command was gone, wiped out. Blotted away. And if the Peeps had used missile pods with the advantages of surprise and short range, casualties must have been massive, for no one would have been suited up and very few people would have gotten off in life pods before their ships died.
Pain twisted deep inside her at the thought of all the dead, but then another thought hit her, and her eyes dropped back into intent focus.
"If you're the surviving SO, then who's picketing the system, Commander?"
"No one, Ma'am. I only had three ships: Windsong, Rondeau, and Balladeer. Under the circumstances, I judged that my immediate duty was to use all three of them to spread the word as quickly as possible, so I brought Windsong here and sent the other two to Quest and Treadway."
"I see." Something in the vice admirals almost mechanical reply gripped Dorcett's attention by the throat, and her hands clenched behind her. She tried to keep her expression neutral, but she knew she'd failed when Sorbanne shook her head.
"It's not your fault, Commander." She sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose hard. "You reasoned that your command would be best employed in alerting other station commanders before more ships were dispatched to Adler than in dodging around the system trying to avoid Peep pursuers, correct?" She lowered her hand, gazing at Dorcett, and the commander nodded. "That was the proper and logical judgment, and my report to the Admiralty will endorse it as such. But you're too late."
"Too late, Ma'am?" Cold, intuitive despair burned in Dorcett's belly even as she repeated the admiral's words, and Sorbanne nodded.
"Seventeen merchantmen and their escorts sailed from Clairmont just over five days ago, Commander Dorcett. They should arrive in Adler within the next twelve hours, and with no pickets to warn them..."
She shrugged, and Jessica Dorcett closed her eyes in horrified understanding... and guilt.
Alistair McKeon sat at the head of his dining cabin table and watched his guests. They'd pretty much come to the end of their comfortable, tasty dinner; now they were working on the last few morsels while they engaged in a dozen separate conversations and sampled their wine, and McKeon allowed himself the mild, self-congratulatory glow a successful host deserved.
Honor sat to his right, as his guest of honor, and Commander Taylor Gillespie, Prince Adrian’s executive officer, faced her across the table. Lieutenant Commander Geraldine Metcalf, McKeon’s tactical officer, sat to Gillespie's right, facing Nimitz, and Honors officers and Surgeon Lieutenant Enrico Walker, Prince Adrian's doctor, occupied the rest of the chairs around the table. James Candless shared the watch outside the hatch to McKeon’s quarters with the Marine sentry while Andrew LaFollet and Robert Whitman stood against the bulkheads, courteously unobtrusive but nonetheless an alert reminder that CruRon Eighteen's commodore was also a great feudal lady.
Some RMN officers, McKeon knew, would have found Honors title and status either ridiculous or irritating. A certain percentage of Manticorans, mostly civilians, but including a number of Queen’s officers who should know better, had never bothered to amend their mental images of the Yeltsin System. They still looked down on Grayson (and its navy) as some sort of comic opera, technically backward vest-pocket principality of religious fanatics with delusions of grandeur, and their contempt extended itself to the planet's aristocratic titles and those who held them. And however much most of the RMNs officers might respect Honors achievements, there would always be those souls who would denigrate her reputation, whether out of jealousy, resentment, or the genuine belief that she owed it all to luck.
God knows there're enough idiots like Jurgens and Lemaitre, he reflected. They actually buy the theory that she's some sort of loose warhead, that her casualties and the ships she's lost or had damaged only happened because she was too reckless to think before she went charging in! The fact that no other skipper could have brought anyone home doesn't mean squat to them. And, of course, there are always the Housemans and the Youngs. It doesn't matter what she accomplishes as far as they're concerned. He reached for his own wineglass as he watched Honor turn her head to address Walker across Nimitz, and hid a mental smile. Well, screw them. We know how good she is, and so does the Admiralty.
Honor paused in her conversation with Walker, as if she felt McKeon’s eyes upon her. She turned to smile at him, and he made a small, semisaluting gesture with his glass. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then hesitated, eyes refocusing as she gazed over his shoulder. McKeon looked a question at her, but she said nothing, so he half-turned in his chair to look in the same direction and felt his eyebrows arch in surprise.
Alex Maybach, McKeon’s personal steward, hovered over two junior stewards as they wheeled an enormous confectionery monstrosity through the pantry hatch. The cake was at least a meter long, baked in a stylized shape obviously intended to represent Prince Adrian, and blazed from end to end with burning candles, and a corner of his surprised brain wondered how Maybach could possibly have kept the thing hidden from him.
He was still wondering when someone gave the signal and the entire dining cabin burst into what a particularly charitable observer might have called singing. McKeon wheeled back to his guests, trying to glare while those of them with sufficient seniority grinned like loons and those too junior for such levity did their best to maintain straight faces, and Nimitz's clear "Bleek!" of delight cut through the chorus.
"...birrrthday to yoouuu!"
The song came to a merciful close in a burst of applause, and McKeon shook his head at Honor.
"How did you manage it?" he demanded under cover of the general hilarity. It never occurred to him to doubt that she was behind it. His own officers might have been willing to ambush him in the wardroom, but none of them would have had the nerve to try the same thing in his own quarters. Yet not even she could have planned this without using the com to arrange things, for until the scrubber unit failed, she'd had no way to know she would be aboard at the proper time. So how had she kept him from realizing that she was in communication with his people while she set it up?
"You remember that long parts list and technical data file Commander Sinkowitz downloaded to your Engineering Department?" she asked with a lurking smile, and he nodded. "Well, I got him to hide a personal message to Commander Palliser in it, and Palliser relayed it to Alex. Surely you didn't think we were going to let you get away without inflicting some sort of party on you!"
"I could hope," he mock-growled, and she laughed, then held out her hand to him. The background noise faded as he gripped it, and she glanced at the others, then looked back at him.
"Happy birthday, Captain, and best wishes from all of us," she said simply. Someone started to clap again, but she raised her left hand in a silence-restoring gesture and went on. "I'm certain your ship's company has its own gift for you, it better have one if it knows what's good for it!, but I brought along a little something of my own."
She released McKeon's hand and reached out towards Robert Whitman. The armsman took three crisp strides forward and drew a small, gaily wrapped package from his tunic pocket. He handed it to his Steadholder with military precision, then came to attention at her shoulder. Andrew LaFollet braced simultaneously to attention against the bulkhead behind her, and the general air of festivity abruptly focused into something much more intense as Honor extended the package to McKeon.
He took it from her slowly, his expression a silent question, but she merely shook her head and gestured for him to unwrap it. Her armsmen's formality and her own change of demeanor made McKeon's nerves tingle, and he untied the ribbon and quickly ripped away the wrapping to reveal the simple black box under it. He glanced back up at Honor, then opened the box slowly and inhaled sharply. Its velvet-lined interior held a pair of RMN collar badges, but instead of the single gold planet of a captain of the list, each of them bore a pair of planets, identical to the ones on Honors collar. He stared at them for a dozen heartbeats, then shook himself and met Honor's gravely smiling eyes.
"Congratulations, Alistair," she said. "It won't be official until we return to Yeltsin, and I know it's supposed to be bad luck to let the cat out of the bag early. But the Admiralty sent out confirmation just before we sailed, and High Admiral Matthews knew I'd want to be the one to tell you, so he passed me the word. When you suffered your Environmental casualty, I decided your birthday was the perfect time to tell you."
No one else said a thing, and as McKeon felt the curiosity hovering in the cabin like an extra presence he realized that she hadn't told anyone else, either. Only her armsmen and, he looked past her at the smile on Andreas Venizelos' face, her chief of staff had known, and he swallowed hard, then turned his wrist so the others could see into the box. There was a moment of intense silence, and then the applause began.
"Congratulations, Skipper!" Commander Gillespie snatched up his glass, raising it to his captain, and other glasses rose around the table. "Hey, if they're kicking you upstairs, does this mean I get command of the Adrian?" Gillespie demanded.
"Not unless BuPers is really desperate!" McKeon growled back. Gillespie laughed, and McKeon reached into the box to brush one collar pin with a fingertip. "Me, a commodore?" He shook his head wonderingly, and Honor laid a hand gently on his arm.
"You deserve it," she said, quietly but firmly, "and I'm glad for you. Of course, this will make you awfully senior to command a heavy cruiser division, so I'll probably lose you, but I'm still glad. And given the way Eighth Fleets expanding, Admiral White Haven will probably find something for you to do without sending you home."
"I..." McKeon paused, unable to decide exactly what he'd meant to say, then reached down to put his own hand over the one on his forearm. "Thank you," he said, equally quietly. "That means a lot, coming from you."
She didn't reply, only squeezed his arm for a moment, then sat back with a smile, and he cleared his throat.
"All right, you lot! That's enough racket!" He shook his head sternly at his unrepentant juniors. "This is no way for the senior officers of a Queens ship, or their allies!, to carry on. Not only have you demonstrated unruliness and a severe case of lese majeste, but a total ignorance of proper birthday party protocol!" He swept them all with twinkling gray eyes, then pointed at the candle strewn cake. "The guest of honor is supposed to blow out his candles to begin the celebration, and unless you people get your priorities straightened back out, I won't share my cake with any of you!"
It was early the next morning by Prince Adrian's clocks when Convoy JNMTC-76 reached its next port of call. Honor had enjoyed her visit to McKeon's ship, and especially the success of her surprise party. Organizing it on such short notice without tipping off an alert skipper like McKeon had been much more complicated than her casual explanation might have suggested, and she felt rather smug at how well she'd pulled it off. But the truth was that she'd become even more spoiled than she'd realized. Alex Maybach had done his best, but she'd missed MacGuiness' unobtrusive services when she turned in after the party. She'd especially missed the rich cocoa that magically appeared just as she was getting ready for bed, regardless of how late that happened to be, and she was rather looking forward to getting "home" again once the convoy reentered normal-space and Scotty could chauffeur her back to Alvarez.
At the moment, however, she stood with Venizelos on Prince Adrian's command deck, Nimitz on her shoulder, and watched McKeon's crew prepare for translation out of hyper. Andrew LaFollet had found a corner into which to tuck himself, though he looked as if he were suffering from a touch of claustrophobia, and Honor didn't blame him. She really would have preferred to have at least McGinley present, as well, but there simply wasn't room to fit her ops officer onto the cramped bridge without getting in the way of Prince Adrian's command crew. Honor supposed she could have insisted on cramming Marcia in anyway. Some flag officers would have done so, at any rate, but without some overridingly important justification, Honor refused to crowd the people who had to be there to operate the ship, however inconvenient it was for her.
The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly, and for as low a cost, as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.
The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.
The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.
One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.
That, unfortunately, was no longer true. Janacek had been out of office for eleven T-years now, but the pernicious effects of his funding decisions lingered on. Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN’s inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.
There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which, given the difference in their tonnages, only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.
The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could, given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser, and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and, like the Prince Consorts, they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.
In a way, Honor thought, standing to one side while she watched McKeon’s bridge crew, that illustrates the entire problem Earl White Haven and I... disagreed over. (She was slightly, and pleasantly, surprised to feel only the smallest twinge as she thought about the earl.) We've still got the tech edge on a ship-for-ship, ton-for-ton basis, but it's shrinking. We can't afford that, but unless we can somehow find a way to break the traditional building patterns, our advantage is going to continue to erode. It won't be anything dramatic or obvious in the short term, but in the long term...
Vice Admiral of the Red Dame Madeleine Sorbanne wasted no time on pleasantries, and her expression, as brusque as her tone, made it clear she had better things to waste her time on than courtesy calls from newly arriving starship captains who refused to take her yeoman's "no" for an answer. The petite admiral had only half-risen to offer a perfunctory handshake, and she flopped back into the chair behind her desk even as she spoke. That desk, unusually littered with data chips and folders of hardcopy, lacked the spartan neatness that was the RMN’s ideal, and Sorbanne's short, white-stranded mahogany-red hair looked as if she were in the habit of running her fingers through it while she fretted.
Well, Dame Madeleine had plenty of excuses for her desk's untidiness... and any fretting she happened to be doing, Jessica Dorcett reminded herself. As the senior officer on Clairmont Station, Sorbanne had seen half her capital ship strength siphoned off to build up Eighth Fleet, but no one had bothered to reduce her command area or responsibilities to reflect her lower strength. And with all the comings and goings leading up to Earl White Havens eventual advance on Barnett, the bustling confusion of Clairmont’s local and through traffic must be enough to try the patience of a saint. Of course, no one had ever nominated Dame Madeleine for canonization, and Dorcett's request for an immediate personal meeting had clearly ticked her off.
"I'm sorry to interrupt your schedule, Ma'am," the commander said now. She ignored the admiral's gestured invitation to take a seat of her own, choosing to remain standing at parade rest instead, and saw Sorbanne's eyebrows rise in surprise. "Under the circumstances, however, I thought that I should make my report directly to you."
"What report?" Some of the irritation faded from Sorbanne's tone. Her reputation for irascibility was exceeded only by her reputation for competence, and crispness diluted her testiness as Dorcett’s strained expression began to register fully. The commander hesitated just a moment, then drew a deep breath and took the plunge.
"Admiral, we've lost Adler," she said, and Sorbanne's chair snapped suddenly upright. The admiral leaned forward, and her high-cheekboned face lost all expression, as if Dorcett had cast a magic spell.
"How?" she asked harshly, and the commander shook her head.
"I don't have all the details, Windsong was too far out for good tactical imagery, but I'm afraid the bare bones were pretty clear. We screwed up, Ma'am, and whoever planned the Peeps' attack had the guts and the smarts to take advantage of it." Dorcett didn't like saying that, yet it had to be said, and her own anger, and shame, made her voice come out flat.
"Explain." Sorbanne sounded as if she were regaining her mental balance, and Dorcett wondered how much of that was real and how much was acting ability.
"Commodore Yeargin had too few sensor platforms for complete coverage, Ma'am, so she placed what she did have to cover the most obvious approach vectors. Then she put her main force into Samovar orbit... and aside from detaching my destroyer division to cover the main asteroid processing node, she posted no pickets at all." Despite iron self-control, Sorbanne winced, and Dorcett went grimly on. "The Peeps came in from above the system ecliptic, which let them skirt the Commodores platforms and avoid my command's sensor envelope entirely And they also came in ballistic."
"Peeps came in ballistic?" Sorbanne repeated carefully, and Dorcett nodded.
"Yes, Ma'am. They must have. Either that, or their stealth systems have achieved a much higher degree of improvement than ONI's been projecting. Even on the course they followed, they should have passed close enough to at least one of our sensor platforms for active impellers to've been detected."
"They came in powered down all the way to attack range?" Sorbanne still seemed to be having trouble with the concept, and Dorcett nodded again.
"Yes, Ma'am. And I'm afraid that isn't all." Sorbanne eyed her narrowly and made a "tell me more" gesture, and Dorcett sighed. "They used missile pods, Admiral," she said quietly.
"Shit." The soft, whispered expletive was almost a prayer, and Sorbanne closed her eyes. She sat that way for several seconds, then opened them and looked at Dorcett once more. "What's the Peep strength in the system?"
"I'm not certain, Ma'am. As I say, we were too far out for really good scans, but my best estimate is four battlecruisers, six to eight heavy cruisers, and half a dozen light cruisers. My tac officer and I saw no destroyers, but I can't guarantee there weren't any."
Sorbanne winced again, this time at the disparity in weight of broadside Dorcett's estimate suggested, especially if the Peeps had, indeed, used missile pods.
"How bad were Commodore Yeargin's losses?" she asked after a moment.
"Ma'am, I..." Dorcett stopped and swallowed. "I'm sorry, Admiral. I must have been... unclear." She inhaled, then went on very flatly. "Aside from my division, the task group’s losses were total, Dame Madeleine. I'm... the senior surviving officer."
Sorbanne didn't say a word. She only sat there for endless, aching seconds, staring at Dorcett while her mind raced. The news that the Peeps had finally deployed missile pods was unwelcome and frightening, but hardly unexpected. Every thinking officer had known the enemy had to be working at full stretch to overcome the huge advantage the Allies' pod monopoly had conferred upon them. But having the long-awaited weapons employed so competently and to such crushing effect by the despised Peeps... that was unexpected. And the moral shock was far more than merely frightening.
Madeleine Sorbanne leaned slowly back in her chair once more, still staring at Dorcett, but she wasn't really seeing the commander. She was seeing another woman's face and thinking about Frances Yeargin and her command. Yeargin always was an arrogant, overconfident bitch, she thought slowly, remembering the dead commodore and her oft expressed contempt for the People's Navy. Damn it, she knew she was short of platforms! The woman should have had at least some pickets out, for God's sake! What the hell did she think she was stationed there for?
But what Yeargin had been thinking was immaterial now. Rightly or wrongly, the future was going to condemn her even more harshly than Sorbanne did now, for never in its entire history, had the RMN suffered a disaster like this... until now. An entire generation of analysts would examine every tiny facet of the Battle of Adler, apportioning blame and assigning guilt with twenty-twenty hindsight and the fine ruthlessness of people who'd never been there, and that was just as immaterial right now as what Yeargin had been thinking. What mattered was that her entire command was gone, wiped out. Blotted away. And if the Peeps had used missile pods with the advantages of surprise and short range, casualties must have been massive, for no one would have been suited up and very few people would have gotten off in life pods before their ships died.
Pain twisted deep inside her at the thought of all the dead, but then another thought hit her, and her eyes dropped back into intent focus.
"If you're the surviving SO, then who's picketing the system, Commander?"
"No one, Ma'am. I only had three ships: Windsong, Rondeau, and Balladeer. Under the circumstances, I judged that my immediate duty was to use all three of them to spread the word as quickly as possible, so I brought Windsong here and sent the other two to Quest and Treadway."
"I see." Something in the vice admirals almost mechanical reply gripped Dorcett's attention by the throat, and her hands clenched behind her. She tried to keep her expression neutral, but she knew she'd failed when Sorbanne shook her head.
"It's not your fault, Commander." She sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose hard. "You reasoned that your command would be best employed in alerting other station commanders before more ships were dispatched to Adler than in dodging around the system trying to avoid Peep pursuers, correct?" She lowered her hand, gazing at Dorcett, and the commander nodded. "That was the proper and logical judgment, and my report to the Admiralty will endorse it as such. But you're too late."
"Too late, Ma'am?" Cold, intuitive despair burned in Dorcett's belly even as she repeated the admiral's words, and Sorbanne nodded.
"Seventeen merchantmen and their escorts sailed from Clairmont just over five days ago, Commander Dorcett. They should arrive in Adler within the next twelve hours, and with no pickets to warn them..."
She shrugged, and Jessica Dorcett closed her eyes in horrified understanding... and guilt.
Alistair McKeon sat at the head of his dining cabin table and watched his guests. They'd pretty much come to the end of their comfortable, tasty dinner; now they were working on the last few morsels while they engaged in a dozen separate conversations and sampled their wine, and McKeon allowed himself the mild, self-congratulatory glow a successful host deserved.
Honor sat to his right, as his guest of honor, and Commander Taylor Gillespie, Prince Adrian’s executive officer, faced her across the table. Lieutenant Commander Geraldine Metcalf, McKeon’s tactical officer, sat to Gillespie's right, facing Nimitz, and Honors officers and Surgeon Lieutenant Enrico Walker, Prince Adrian's doctor, occupied the rest of the chairs around the table. James Candless shared the watch outside the hatch to McKeon’s quarters with the Marine sentry while Andrew LaFollet and Robert Whitman stood against the bulkheads, courteously unobtrusive but nonetheless an alert reminder that CruRon Eighteen's commodore was also a great feudal lady.
Some RMN officers, McKeon knew, would have found Honors title and status either ridiculous or irritating. A certain percentage of Manticorans, mostly civilians, but including a number of Queen’s officers who should know better, had never bothered to amend their mental images of the Yeltsin System. They still looked down on Grayson (and its navy) as some sort of comic opera, technically backward vest-pocket principality of religious fanatics with delusions of grandeur, and their contempt extended itself to the planet's aristocratic titles and those who held them. And however much most of the RMNs officers might respect Honors achievements, there would always be those souls who would denigrate her reputation, whether out of jealousy, resentment, or the genuine belief that she owed it all to luck.
God knows there're enough idiots like Jurgens and Lemaitre, he reflected. They actually buy the theory that she's some sort of loose warhead, that her casualties and the ships she's lost or had damaged only happened because she was too reckless to think before she went charging in! The fact that no other skipper could have brought anyone home doesn't mean squat to them. And, of course, there are always the Housemans and the Youngs. It doesn't matter what she accomplishes as far as they're concerned. He reached for his own wineglass as he watched Honor turn her head to address Walker across Nimitz, and hid a mental smile. Well, screw them. We know how good she is, and so does the Admiralty.
Honor paused in her conversation with Walker, as if she felt McKeon’s eyes upon her. She turned to smile at him, and he made a small, semisaluting gesture with his glass. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then hesitated, eyes refocusing as she gazed over his shoulder. McKeon looked a question at her, but she said nothing, so he half-turned in his chair to look in the same direction and felt his eyebrows arch in surprise.
Alex Maybach, McKeon’s personal steward, hovered over two junior stewards as they wheeled an enormous confectionery monstrosity through the pantry hatch. The cake was at least a meter long, baked in a stylized shape obviously intended to represent Prince Adrian, and blazed from end to end with burning candles, and a corner of his surprised brain wondered how Maybach could possibly have kept the thing hidden from him.
He was still wondering when someone gave the signal and the entire dining cabin burst into what a particularly charitable observer might have called singing. McKeon wheeled back to his guests, trying to glare while those of them with sufficient seniority grinned like loons and those too junior for such levity did their best to maintain straight faces, and Nimitz's clear "Bleek!" of delight cut through the chorus.
"...birrrthday to yoouuu!"
The song came to a merciful close in a burst of applause, and McKeon shook his head at Honor.
"How did you manage it?" he demanded under cover of the general hilarity. It never occurred to him to doubt that she was behind it. His own officers might have been willing to ambush him in the wardroom, but none of them would have had the nerve to try the same thing in his own quarters. Yet not even she could have planned this without using the com to arrange things, for until the scrubber unit failed, she'd had no way to know she would be aboard at the proper time. So how had she kept him from realizing that she was in communication with his people while she set it up?
"You remember that long parts list and technical data file Commander Sinkowitz downloaded to your Engineering Department?" she asked with a lurking smile, and he nodded. "Well, I got him to hide a personal message to Commander Palliser in it, and Palliser relayed it to Alex. Surely you didn't think we were going to let you get away without inflicting some sort of party on you!"
"I could hope," he mock-growled, and she laughed, then held out her hand to him. The background noise faded as he gripped it, and she glanced at the others, then looked back at him.
"Happy birthday, Captain, and best wishes from all of us," she said simply. Someone started to clap again, but she raised her left hand in a silence-restoring gesture and went on. "I'm certain your ship's company has its own gift for you, it better have one if it knows what's good for it!, but I brought along a little something of my own."
She released McKeon's hand and reached out towards Robert Whitman. The armsman took three crisp strides forward and drew a small, gaily wrapped package from his tunic pocket. He handed it to his Steadholder with military precision, then came to attention at her shoulder. Andrew LaFollet braced simultaneously to attention against the bulkhead behind her, and the general air of festivity abruptly focused into something much more intense as Honor extended the package to McKeon.
He took it from her slowly, his expression a silent question, but she merely shook her head and gestured for him to unwrap it. Her armsmen's formality and her own change of demeanor made McKeon's nerves tingle, and he untied the ribbon and quickly ripped away the wrapping to reveal the simple black box under it. He glanced back up at Honor, then opened the box slowly and inhaled sharply. Its velvet-lined interior held a pair of RMN collar badges, but instead of the single gold planet of a captain of the list, each of them bore a pair of planets, identical to the ones on Honors collar. He stared at them for a dozen heartbeats, then shook himself and met Honor's gravely smiling eyes.
"Congratulations, Alistair," she said. "It won't be official until we return to Yeltsin, and I know it's supposed to be bad luck to let the cat out of the bag early. But the Admiralty sent out confirmation just before we sailed, and High Admiral Matthews knew I'd want to be the one to tell you, so he passed me the word. When you suffered your Environmental casualty, I decided your birthday was the perfect time to tell you."
No one else said a thing, and as McKeon felt the curiosity hovering in the cabin like an extra presence he realized that she hadn't told anyone else, either. Only her armsmen and, he looked past her at the smile on Andreas Venizelos' face, her chief of staff had known, and he swallowed hard, then turned his wrist so the others could see into the box. There was a moment of intense silence, and then the applause began.
"Congratulations, Skipper!" Commander Gillespie snatched up his glass, raising it to his captain, and other glasses rose around the table. "Hey, if they're kicking you upstairs, does this mean I get command of the Adrian?" Gillespie demanded.
"Not unless BuPers is really desperate!" McKeon growled back. Gillespie laughed, and McKeon reached into the box to brush one collar pin with a fingertip. "Me, a commodore?" He shook his head wonderingly, and Honor laid a hand gently on his arm.
"You deserve it," she said, quietly but firmly, "and I'm glad for you. Of course, this will make you awfully senior to command a heavy cruiser division, so I'll probably lose you, but I'm still glad. And given the way Eighth Fleets expanding, Admiral White Haven will probably find something for you to do without sending you home."
"I..." McKeon paused, unable to decide exactly what he'd meant to say, then reached down to put his own hand over the one on his forearm. "Thank you," he said, equally quietly. "That means a lot, coming from you."
She didn't reply, only squeezed his arm for a moment, then sat back with a smile, and he cleared his throat.
"All right, you lot! That's enough racket!" He shook his head sternly at his unrepentant juniors. "This is no way for the senior officers of a Queens ship, or their allies!, to carry on. Not only have you demonstrated unruliness and a severe case of lese majeste, but a total ignorance of proper birthday party protocol!" He swept them all with twinkling gray eyes, then pointed at the candle strewn cake. "The guest of honor is supposed to blow out his candles to begin the celebration, and unless you people get your priorities straightened back out, I won't share my cake with any of you!"
It was early the next morning by Prince Adrian's clocks when Convoy JNMTC-76 reached its next port of call. Honor had enjoyed her visit to McKeon's ship, and especially the success of her surprise party. Organizing it on such short notice without tipping off an alert skipper like McKeon had been much more complicated than her casual explanation might have suggested, and she felt rather smug at how well she'd pulled it off. But the truth was that she'd become even more spoiled than she'd realized. Alex Maybach had done his best, but she'd missed MacGuiness' unobtrusive services when she turned in after the party. She'd especially missed the rich cocoa that magically appeared just as she was getting ready for bed, regardless of how late that happened to be, and she was rather looking forward to getting "home" again once the convoy reentered normal-space and Scotty could chauffeur her back to Alvarez.
At the moment, however, she stood with Venizelos on Prince Adrian's command deck, Nimitz on her shoulder, and watched McKeon's crew prepare for translation out of hyper. Andrew LaFollet had found a corner into which to tuck himself, though he looked as if he were suffering from a touch of claustrophobia, and Honor didn't blame him. She really would have preferred to have at least McGinley present, as well, but there simply wasn't room to fit her ops officer onto the cramped bridge without getting in the way of Prince Adrian's command crew. Honor supposed she could have insisted on cramming Marcia in anyway. Some flag officers would have done so, at any rate, but without some overridingly important justification, Honor refused to crowd the people who had to be there to operate the ship, however inconvenient it was for her.
The Prince Consort-class ships like Prince Adrian were the product of a design philosophy which had been abandoned with the emergence of the later Star Knights. The Prince Consorts' original design was over sixty T-years old, dating back to the very first installment of the naval build-up Roger III had begun to counter the PRH's expansionism, and they hadn't been intended to function as flagships. Instead, in an effort to get as much firepower into space as quickly, and for as low a cost, as possible, BuShips' architects had chosen to omit a proper flag deck and all its support systems and used the freed mass to tuck an extra graser and an extra pair of missile launchers into each broadside. In fact, even their regular command decks had been built to unusually austere standards to help compensate for the increased armament and more magazine space. Instead of the extra, unused bridge volume BuShips normally allocated to new designs to provide room for the proliferation of control systems which always occurred, the Prince Consorts had been given just enough room for their original requirements. Which meant their bridges had become increasingly cramped as inevitable refits jammed in supplementary consoles and displays and panels anywhere a few cubic centimeters could be found for them.
The problem had been recognized at the time, but accepted as an unavoidable consequence of producing ships with maximum firepower for their cost and tonnage, and BuShips had projected a program which would have built the Prince Consorts in groups of seven and paired each group with a Crusader-class ship which did have a flag deck to make a full eight-ship squadron. Unfortunately, what had seemed like a good idea at the time had begun to look very different since the outbreak of the Navy's first serious shooting war in a hundred and twenty T-years.
The original Crusader building program had failed to allow for the unavoidable cycle of overhauls any warship required, with the result that at least twenty-five percent too few flagships had been allowed from the beginning, and Sir Edward Janacek's decision to cut funding for the Crusaders by over seventy percent during his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty had only made bad worse. But Janacek had viewed the Navy's proper role as anti-piracy patrols and defense of the Manticore Binary System itself. Anything more "aggressive" than that had clashed with his Conservative Party prejudice against "imperialist adventures" which were likely to "provoke" the People's Republic, and he'd regarded the deployment of cruiser squadrons to distant stations as the precursor to the gunboat diplomacy he rejected.
One way to hamstring such deployments was to cut down on the number of available flagships, which was precisely what he'd done, although he'd been careful to make the Crusaders' higher cost per unit his official reason. During his tenure, more than half the Navy's total cruisers had been tasked for solo operations chasing pirates on distant stations (for which no command ships were required), and most of the remainder had been concentrated in one spot and attached to Home Fleet, where only a limited number of flagships were needed. As a result, the implications of the shortage of Crusaders had gone largely unobserved at the time.
That, unfortunately, was no longer true. Janacek had been out of office for eleven T-years now, but the pernicious effects of his funding decisions lingered on. Numerically, the Crown Princes were the largest single class of heavy cruisers in the RMN’s inventory, yet their lack of squadron command facilities severely limited their utility. The fact that the bigger, less numerous Star Knights' flag accommodations forced the Admiralty to keep tapping them for the detached command roles the Crown Princes couldn't fulfill properly also meant that the newer ships had suffered higher proportional losses. Prince Adrian and her sisters tended to stay tethered to task force and fleet formations, where someone else could provide the space for a commodore or admiral and her staff. That meant they were normally found in company with ships of the wall, whereas the Star Knights, exposed on frontier and convoy deployments without capital ship support, were much more likely to find themselves engaged with fast battlecruiser/cruiser-level raiding forces. And, of course, every Star Knight lost to enemy action or sent to the yard by battle damage reduced the supply of command ships by yet another unit.
There wasn't actually all that much to choose between the individual offensive power of the two classes, which, given the difference in their tonnages, only went to prove that even the Star Knights' design was less than perfect. Powerful as the Star Knights were, too little of their volume was allocated to offensive systems, in Honor's opinion, and too much was used on defense, probably as a reaction against the perceived shortcomings of their predecessors.
The newer class's more powerful sidewall generators, heavier armor, better electronic warfare capabilities, and more numerous point defense systems made them at least thirty percent tougher than the older Prince Consorts, and BuShips fully recognized the need for a better balance between offense and defense. Unfortunately, the need for cruiser flagships meant the yards were churning out Star Knights as quickly as they could, given the limited amounts of space which could be diverted from capital ship construction for any sort of cruiser, and that had significantly delayed introduction of the new Edward Saganami-class ships. The Saganamis, ten percent larger than the Star Knights and designed to take full advantage of the Navy's current battle experience and to incorporate the best balance of Grayson and Manticoran concepts, should have entered the construction pipeline over three T-years ago, but BuShips had decided it couldn't afford to divert building capacity to a new class (which, undoubtedly, would have its own share of production-oriented bugs to overcome) when the need for volume production was so acute. And so the Star Knights continued to be built to a basic design which was now eighteen years old. To be sure, their design had been on the cutting edge when it was finalized, and, like the Prince Consorts, they had been materially upgraded since, but even with as heavy a refit schedule as deployment pressures would permit, the class was losing its superiority over the Peeps.
In a way, Honor thought, standing to one side while she watched McKeon’s bridge crew, that illustrates the entire problem Earl White Haven and I... disagreed over. (She was slightly, and pleasantly, surprised to feel only the smallest twinge as she thought about the earl.) We've still got the tech edge on a ship-for-ship, ton-for-ton basis, but it's shrinking. We can't afford that, but unless we can somehow find a way to break the traditional building patterns, our advantage is going to continue to erode. It won't be anything dramatic or obvious in the short term, but in the long term...