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And so she'd settled for the lesser charge, the incident that had happened earlier, before witnesses, when she rebuffed his smugly confident advances. Perhaps if she hadn't been so surprised, so taken aback by his sudden interest and obvious assurance that she would agree, she might have declined more gracefully. But it wasn't a problem she'd ever had before. She'd never developed the techniques for declining without affronting his overweening ego, and he hadn't taken it well. No doubt that "slight" to his pride was what had triggered later events, but his immediate response had been bad enough, and the Academy took a dim view of sexual harassment, especially when it took the form of insulting language and abusive conduct directed by a senior midshipman at a junior. Commandant Hartley had been furious enough with him over that, but who would have believed the truth?
Commandant Hartley would have, she thought. She'd realized that years ago, and hated herself for not telling him at the time. Looking back, she could recognize his hints, his all but overt pleas for her to tell him everything. If he hadn't suspected, he would hardly have required Young to apologize after she'd reduced him to a bloody pulp. Young had counted on neither the strength and reaction time Sphinx's gravity bestowed nor the extra tutoring in unarmed combat Chief MacDougal had been giving her, and she'd known better than to let him up after she had him down. He was only lucky he'd tried for her in the showers, when Nimitz wasn't around, for he would be far less handsome today if the treecat had been present.
No doubt it was as well Nimitz hadn't been there, and, she admitted, there'd been a certain savage joy in hurting him herself for what he'd tried to do. But the response had been entirely out of proportion to his official offense, and no one had ever doubted that his "fall" had been nothing of the sort. Hartley might not have had any proof, but he would never have come down on Young so harshly under the circumstances if he hadn't had a pretty shrewd notion of what had actually happened.
Yet she hadn't realized that then, and she'd told herself she'd already dealt with the matter, anyway. That she didn't want to precipitate a scandal that could only hurt the Academy. That it was a case of least said, soonest mended, since no one would have believed her anyway. Bad enough to be involved in something so humiliating and degrading without exposing herself to that, as well! She'd almost been able to hear the sniggers about the homely horse of a girl and her "delusions," and, after all, hadn't she let herself get a little carried away? There'd been no need to pound him into semi-consciousness. That had gone beyond simple selfdefense into the realm of punishment.
So she'd let the matter rest, and in so doing she'd bought herself the worst of both worlds. Attempted rape was one of the service's crash-and-burn offenses; if Young had been convicted of that, he would never have worn an officer's uniform, noble birth or no. But he hadn't been. She hadn't gotten him out of the service, and she had made an enemy for life, for Young would never forget that she'd beaten him bloody. Nor would he ever forgive her for the humiliation of being forced to apologize to her before Commandant Hartley and his executive officer, and he had powerful friends, both in and out of the service. She'd felt their influence more than once in her career, and his malicious delight in dropping full responsibility for the entire Basilisk System on her shoulders—leaving her with a single, over-age light cruiser to do a job which should have been the task of an entire flotilla—burned on her tongue like poison. It was petty and vicious ... and entirely in keeping with his personality.
She inhaled deeply as the lift reached the boat bay and its door opened once more. She'd regained enough of her composure to shake Tankersley's hand and make herself sound almost normal as she bade him farewell and boarded her cutter once more.
She settled back in her seat as the cutter separated from Warlock and headed back to Fearless, and her mind reached out to grapple with her crew's reaction to this latest development. No doubt they would see Warlock's departure as one more sign that they'd been demoted to the least important duty the Fleet could find and abandoned, and they would soon realize just how heavy a burden Young had dropped on them. Her single ship would be required to police the entire system and all of the traffic passing through the Basilisk terminus, and there was no way they could do it. They couldn't be in enough places at once, and trying to would impose a mind— and body-numbing strain on all of them.
Which was exactly what Young had intended. He was leaving her an impossible job, content in the knowledge that her failure to discharge it would go into her record. Unlike him, Honor had yet to make list, and if she botched her first independent command, however it had fallen on her, she never would.
But she hadn't botched it yet, and she nodded to herself—a choppy, angry nod. Even knowing that Young had set her up, that he intended for her to fail and ruin herself, was better than serving under his command, she told herself. Let him take himself off to Manticore. The sooner he got out of the same star system as her, the better she'd like it! And of one thing she was certain; she couldn't do any worse at the job than he had.
She'd made a mistake once where he was concerned. She wouldn't let him push her into another. Whatever it took, she would discharge her own duties and meet her own responsibilities. Not just to protect her career, but because they were her duties and responsibilities. Because she would not let an aristocratic piece of scum like Pavel Young win.
She straightened her spine and looked down at the data chip of her orders, and her dark brown eyes were dangerous.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Commandant Hartley would have, she thought. She'd realized that years ago, and hated herself for not telling him at the time. Looking back, she could recognize his hints, his all but overt pleas for her to tell him everything. If he hadn't suspected, he would hardly have required Young to apologize after she'd reduced him to a bloody pulp. Young had counted on neither the strength and reaction time Sphinx's gravity bestowed nor the extra tutoring in unarmed combat Chief MacDougal had been giving her, and she'd known better than to let him up after she had him down. He was only lucky he'd tried for her in the showers, when Nimitz wasn't around, for he would be far less handsome today if the treecat had been present.
No doubt it was as well Nimitz hadn't been there, and, she admitted, there'd been a certain savage joy in hurting him herself for what he'd tried to do. But the response had been entirely out of proportion to his official offense, and no one had ever doubted that his "fall" had been nothing of the sort. Hartley might not have had any proof, but he would never have come down on Young so harshly under the circumstances if he hadn't had a pretty shrewd notion of what had actually happened.
Yet she hadn't realized that then, and she'd told herself she'd already dealt with the matter, anyway. That she didn't want to precipitate a scandal that could only hurt the Academy. That it was a case of least said, soonest mended, since no one would have believed her anyway. Bad enough to be involved in something so humiliating and degrading without exposing herself to that, as well! She'd almost been able to hear the sniggers about the homely horse of a girl and her "delusions," and, after all, hadn't she let herself get a little carried away? There'd been no need to pound him into semi-consciousness. That had gone beyond simple selfdefense into the realm of punishment.
So she'd let the matter rest, and in so doing she'd bought herself the worst of both worlds. Attempted rape was one of the service's crash-and-burn offenses; if Young had been convicted of that, he would never have worn an officer's uniform, noble birth or no. But he hadn't been. She hadn't gotten him out of the service, and she had made an enemy for life, for Young would never forget that she'd beaten him bloody. Nor would he ever forgive her for the humiliation of being forced to apologize to her before Commandant Hartley and his executive officer, and he had powerful friends, both in and out of the service. She'd felt their influence more than once in her career, and his malicious delight in dropping full responsibility for the entire Basilisk System on her shoulders—leaving her with a single, over-age light cruiser to do a job which should have been the task of an entire flotilla—burned on her tongue like poison. It was petty and vicious ... and entirely in keeping with his personality.
She inhaled deeply as the lift reached the boat bay and its door opened once more. She'd regained enough of her composure to shake Tankersley's hand and make herself sound almost normal as she bade him farewell and boarded her cutter once more.
She settled back in her seat as the cutter separated from Warlock and headed back to Fearless, and her mind reached out to grapple with her crew's reaction to this latest development. No doubt they would see Warlock's departure as one more sign that they'd been demoted to the least important duty the Fleet could find and abandoned, and they would soon realize just how heavy a burden Young had dropped on them. Her single ship would be required to police the entire system and all of the traffic passing through the Basilisk terminus, and there was no way they could do it. They couldn't be in enough places at once, and trying to would impose a mind— and body-numbing strain on all of them.
Which was exactly what Young had intended. He was leaving her an impossible job, content in the knowledge that her failure to discharge it would go into her record. Unlike him, Honor had yet to make list, and if she botched her first independent command, however it had fallen on her, she never would.
But she hadn't botched it yet, and she nodded to herself—a choppy, angry nod. Even knowing that Young had set her up, that he intended for her to fail and ruin herself, was better than serving under his command, she told herself. Let him take himself off to Manticore. The sooner he got out of the same star system as her, the better she'd like it! And of one thing she was certain; she couldn't do any worse at the job than he had.
She'd made a mistake once where he was concerned. She wouldn't let him push her into another. Whatever it took, she would discharge her own duties and meet her own responsibilities. Not just to protect her career, but because they were her duties and responsibilities. Because she would not let an aristocratic piece of scum like Pavel Young win.
She straightened her spine and looked down at the data chip of her orders, and her dark brown eyes were dangerous.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The officers in the captain's briefing room just off Fearless's bridge rose as Honor came through the hatch. She waved them back into their chairs and crossed to her own, her movements brisk and intense. She sat and turned to face them all, and her face was expressionless.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she began without preamble, "Warlock will be departing for Manticore for refit within the hour." McKeon sat straighter in surprise, but she kept her voice cool and level, almost clipped, as she went on. "Captain Young will be accompanying her, which will leave Fearless the only Queen's ship in the system ... and myself as senior officer."
She allowed herself a small smile at the almost-sound of dismay that swept the compartment, but her eyes were ice. She'd tried motivating them through opportunity and pride in self and hit a stone wall. Very well. If they wouldn't respond to her invitations to meet their responsibilities for their own sense of self-worth, she would try other means.
"Needless to say, this will leave us with a great many commitments, many of them mutually contradictory. This, however, is a Queen's ship. We will discharge our responsibilities, or I will know the reason why. Is that clear?"
Those cold brown eyes seemed to impale each of them in turn, and McKeon moved slightly in his chair as they lingered on him. His chin rose, but he said nothing, and she nodded.
"Good. In that case, let's move on to precisely what our duties and responsibilities are, shall we?"
She punched buttons on her terminal at the head of the conference table, and a small-scale holo display of the Basilisk System bloomed above it. She manipulated more buttons, and a bright red cursor blinked to life.
"We have a single ship, ladies and gentlemen, and our problem, in the simplest terms, is that one ship can be in only one place at a time. The Fleet is responsible for supporting Basilisk Control in management of Junction through traffic, including customs inspections as required. In addition, we are responsible for inspection of all traffic with Medusa itself or with the planet's orbital facilities, for supporting the Resident Commissioner and her Native Protection Agency police, for safeguarding all extraMedusan visitors to the planet, and for insuring the security of this system against all external threats. To accomplish this, we must be here—" the cursor blinked in orbital proximity to Medusa "—here—" it blinked amid the flowing beads of traffic around the junction terminus "—and, in fact, here." The cursor swept a wide circuit of the system, right on the twenty-light-minute radius of a G5 star's hyper limit.
She let the red light circle the holo display's central star for several seconds, then killed the cursor and folded her hands before her on the tabletop.
"Obviously, ladies and gentlemen, a single light cruiser can't be in all those places at once. Nonetheless, I have my orders from Captain Young, and I will discharge them."
McKeon sat silent, staring at her in disbelief. She couldn't be serious! As she herself had just proven, no single ship could discharge them.
But she obviously meant to try, and his cheeks burned as he realized what she'd been doing in her quarters over the three hours since her return from Warlock. She'd been tackling her impossible assignment by herself, wrestling with it without even attempting to involve her officers in its solution, for they'd proven that she couldn't. He'd proven that she couldn't.
His hands gripped together under the edge of the table. The final responsibility would have been Harrington's in any case, but captains had officers—and especially first officers—specifically to help them in situations like this. More, McKeon had already grasped the malice behind her new orders. He'd suspected there was something between her and Young; now he knew there was. Young was running a grave risk with his own career by quitting his station, though it seemed likely he had the patronage and influence to stave off outright disaster. But if Harrington failed to discharge the responsibilities he'd dumped on her, however impossible ...
He shivered internally and made himself concentrate on her words.
"Lieutenant Venizelos."
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"You will select thirty-five ratings and one junior officer for detached duty. Fearless will escort Warlock to the terminus. As soon as Warlock has departed, I will drop you, your chosen personnel, and both pinnaces. You will rendezvous with Basilisk Control and assume the duties of customs and security officer for the terminus traffic. You will be attached to Basilisk Control for that purpose until further notice. Understood?"
Venizelos gawked at her for a moment, and even McKeon blinked. It was unheard of! But it might just work, he admitted almost unwillingly. Unlike cutters, pinnaces were large enough to mount impeller drives and inertial compensators, and they were armed. Their weapons might be popguns and slingshots compared to regular warships, but they were more than sufficient to police unarmed merchantmen.
Yet Venizelos was only a lieutenant, and he would be ten hours' com time from his commanding officer. He'd be entirely on his own, and one wrong decision on his part could ruin not only his own career but Harrington's, as well, which certainly explained his white, strained expression.
The Captain sat motionless, eyes on Venizelos's face, and her mouth tightened ominously. One tapering forefinger tapped the tabletop gently, and the tactical officer shook himself visibly.
"Uh, yes, Ma'am! Understood."
"Good." Honor regarded him levelly for another moment, tasting his anxiety and uncertainty, and made herself step firmly on her compassion. She was throwing him into the deep end, but she'd been three years younger than he was now when she assumed command of LAC 113. And, she thought mordantly, if he screwed up, Pavel Young and his cronies would see to it that she paid the price for it, not Venizelos. Not that she intended to tell the lieutenant that.
"I will leave you detailed instructions," she told him, relenting just a bit, and he sighed in what he clearly thought was unobtrusive relief, then stiffened again as she added, "but I will expect you to exercise your own discretion and initiative as the situation requires."
He nodded again, unhappily, and she turned her hard eyes on Dominica Santos.
"Commander Santos."
"Yes, Captain?" The lieutenant commander looked much calmer than Venizelos had, possibly because she knew there was no way Honor would detail her chief engineer for detached duty.
"I want you to confer with Lieutenant Venizelos before his departure. Get with the exec, as well. Before the lieutenant leaves us, I want a complete inventory of our on-hand recon drones."
She paused, and Santos nodded as she tapped a note into her memo pad.
"Yes, Ma'am. May I ask the purpose of the inventory?"
"You may. Once you've completed it, I want you and your department to begin stripping the sensor heads from the missile bodies in order to fit them with simple station-keeping drives and astrogation packages." This time Santos looked up quickly, her composure noticeably cracked. "I imagine we can do the job by swapping the sensor heads into standard warning and navigation beacons. If not, I want a design for a system that will work on my desk by thirteen hundred."
She locked eyes with the engineer, and Santos flinched. She hid her dismay well, but Honor could almost feel her racing thoughts as the magnitude of her task loomed before her. Just the man-hours involved were daunting, and if she had to design from scratch ...
"As soon as we've dropped Lieutenant Venizelos and his party," Honor continued in that same flat, cool voice, "Fearless will begin a globular sweep pattern ten light-minutes from Basilisk. Lieutenant Stromboli—" the astrogator started in his chair as her glance moved to him "—will work out a least-time course for us, and we will deploy our drones as stationary sensor platforms. I realize that we will almost certainly have insufficient drones for complete coverage, but we'll concentrate on the ecliptic. We can't make patrol sweeps by the book with only one ship, but we can cover the most likely approach vectors."
"You want us to fit all of them with station-keeping drives, Ma'am?" Santos asked after a moment.
"That's what I said, Commander."
"But—" The engineer caught Honor's glacial glance and changed what she'd been about to say. "I expect you're right about fitting the sensor heads into standard beacon kits, Ma'am, but the numbers you're talking about are going to clean out our kits in a hurry. We're going to have to scratch-build an awful lot of drives and astro packs. That's not going to be cheap, and I don't even know if we have sufficient spares aboard."
"What we don't have, we'll fabricate. What we can't fabricate, we'll requisition from Basilisk Control. What we can't requisition, we'll steal." Honor bared her teeth in a humorless smile. "Is that clear, Commander Santos?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"A point, Captain," McKeon heard himself say, and Harrington's eyes whipped to his face. They seemed to harden a bit more, but there was wariness—and perhaps a trace of surprise—in them, as well.
"Yes, Exec?"
"I'm not certain how many probes we have in stores, Ma'am, but I am certain you're right about our inability to achieve complete coverage even if we can—I mean, even after we have fitted them all with station-keeping drives." He was speaking stiffly, and he knew it, but he was also contributing to the solution of a problem for the first time since Harrington had come on board. It felt ... odd. Unnatural.
"And?" the captain prompted him.
"We also have the problem of their endurance, Ma'am. They were never intended for long-term deployment like this. But we might be able to increase their effective time on station by setting them for burst activation. They've got a passive detection range of just over twenty light-minutes against an active impeller drive. If they're on the ten-light-minute shell, they'll have a reach of over half a light-hour from the primary—call it forty minutes' flight time."
Honor nodded. The best radiation and particle shielding available still limited a ship to a maximum speed of .8 c in normal space.
"If we set them to come up for, say, thirty seconds every half-hour, they should detect any incoming vessel under power in normal space at least twenty light-minutes out. That should give us sufficient time to respond, and at the same time increase their endurance by a factor of sixty."
"An excellent suggestion, Exec." Honor smiled at him, grateful that he'd finally come out of his shell, and his facial muscles twitched as if to return it. But then they stiffened again, as if he regretted his momentary lapse, and she smothered a frown of her own.
"Lieutenant Venizelos." The tactical officer looked positively harried as she turned back to him, and her smothered frown turned into a smothered smile at his expression.
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"Lieutenant Cardones will be taking over your responsibilities in your absence. In addition to your other duties before departure, I want you to get with him and work out the optimum drone deployment based on the availability figures I feel certain Commander Santos and Commander McKeon will have for you within the hour."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Very well. Now, once we've detached the pinnaces and deployed our drones, I intend to place Fearless in Medusa orbit. It will be necessary for me to meet and confer with the Resident Commissioner as soon as possible, which will, of course, require a visit to the planet. In addition, however, the detachment of our pinnaces will force us to rely on our cutters for all inspections of space-to-surface and orbit-to-orbit trade. Since they do not have impellers, we may be required to use Fearless herself to move them from orbit to orbit in order to cover all targets. Moreover, the planet lies within three light-minutes of the inner edge of our drone deployment, and our onboard sensors have far more reach than the drones will. By remaining in Medusa orbit, we will be so positioned as to allow our sensors to cover the most critical spatial volume of our responsibilities and also free drones to thicken other portions of the net. I'll want at least one drone reserved to cover the planet if we leave orbit, as I intend to run periodic sweeps of the inner system, if possible, but I'm afraid we'll find ourselves too busy to make many of them. Is all this understood?"
She sat back and swept them with her eyes. Most of them nodded; none shook their heads.
"Excellent. In that case—"
"Ah, Captain?"
"Yes, Lieutenant Venizelos?"
"Something just occurred to me, Ma'am. Commander McKeon's right about the probe endurance, and even without that consideration, getting the kind of coverage you're talking about would be a real problem with the numbers we have aboard. We could get a lot better density if we asked Warlock to drop off any she can spare. I mean, it's not like she's going to be needing them in Manticore."
"I appreciate the suggestion," Honor said in an absolutely toneless voice, "but I'm afraid it's impractical. We'll just have to do the best we can from our own resources."
"But, Captain—"
"I said it's impractical, Lieutenant." Her voice was even flatter than before, its very lack of expression a warning, and Venizelos closed his mouth with a snap. He shot a helpless, sidelong glance at McKeon, but the exec didn't even blink. He'd already noted that Harrington planned to detach her pinnaces after the heavy cruiser—and Young—had departed. Now her response to Venizelos confirmed his reading of the situation. Whatever the source of the bad blood between her and Young, it was nasty enough for him to deliberately set her up for disaster ... and for her to see it coming. And to take steps against it only after he was no longer in a position to frustrate them.
All of which sounded ominously as though HMS Fearless — and her officers — might just find themselves caught in the crossfire.
Honor watched her executive officer's masklike expression and guessed was going on behind it. He was right, of course—and so was Venizelos. She deeply regretted having stepped on the tactical officer so hard, especially when he'd only offered the sort of suggestion she'd practically prayed for her officers to make, but she couldn't explain the enmity between her and Young. Even if it hadn't been unthinkable for any CO to reveal such things to her subordinates, it would have sounded entirely too much like petulant whining.
"Are there any other comments or suggestions?" she asked after a moment. There were none, and she nodded.
"I will announce our new orders and responsibilities to the ship's company at fourteen hundred. Lieutenant Venizelos, I'll want a list of the personnel you want for your party by thirteen hundred. Commander McKeon will vet them before you submit them to me, but I want final approval made before I address the crew."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Very well, ladies and gentlemen. You have your instructions. Let's be about them."
She nodded, and they rose and hurried from the compartment. They didn't look very happy, but at least they were actively engaged with their duties for the first time in far too long. Perhaps it was a good sign.
The hatch closed behind the last of them, and she put her elbows on the table and buried her face in her palms, massaging her temples with her fingertips. God, she hoped it was a good sign! She'd done her best to radiate confidence, but a terrifying number of things could go wrong. Merchant skippers could be prickly about their right of passage, and Venizelos might well provoke an interstellar incident if he pressed the wrong captain too hard. Even with McKeon's suggestion, the endurance of their cobbled-up sensor platforms would be frighteningly limited. They might last the three months until Warlock returned—with luck—if Young didn't find some excuse to extend his "refit" even further. And, worst of all, all of her plans counted on nothing going seriously wrong anywhere. If something did break, she had an excellent chance of knowing about it, but she had an even better chance of being in entirely the wrong place to do anything to stop it.
She sighed and straightened, then lowered her hands to the table and stared long and hard at their backs.
In the final analysis, everything depended on her crew, and she hated to think about the strain she was about to impose upon them. Marines would be of limited utility to Venizelos, so the tactical officer would almost certainly ask solely for naval ratings. That meant he would be taking almost ten percent of Fearless's ship's company with him, and she would have a very hard time denying him the best ten percent, with the most small-craft experience. Her own customs parties for orbital traffic would have to come from what was left, and she'd already noted an appalling number of merchantmen in Medusa orbit. What they could be finding to trade with the aborigines was beyond her imagination, but they were clearly trading a lot of something, and it would be her duty to check every one of those ships.
It would be tempting, she knew, to settle for a simple examination of their manifests, but that wasn't what the Fleet expected of her. Manifest checks would do for through traffic entering the system only to transit the Junction; in the case of vessels trading with Manticoran territory, however, or those transshipping cargo here, she was supposed to inspect the cargo shuttles and ships themselves for contraband. That meant long, grueling hours for her people, and each inspection party would require an officer or senior petty officer to command it.
Even if she had to make no other detachments, that was going to leave her chronically shorthanded, and she could almost see the domino effect rippling towards her. Too few people meant longer watches, less free time, and more resentment from a crew that was already hostile at a time when she needed absolute top effort from everyone on board.
She sighed again and stood, looking around the empty compartment. So be it. Her own nature and all of her training cried out for her to lead, but if leadership failed she would cajole, kick, bully, or terrorize. One way or the other, whatever it took, she would get it done.
They could hate her guts all they liked as long as they did their duty.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she began without preamble, "Warlock will be departing for Manticore for refit within the hour." McKeon sat straighter in surprise, but she kept her voice cool and level, almost clipped, as she went on. "Captain Young will be accompanying her, which will leave Fearless the only Queen's ship in the system ... and myself as senior officer."
She allowed herself a small smile at the almost-sound of dismay that swept the compartment, but her eyes were ice. She'd tried motivating them through opportunity and pride in self and hit a stone wall. Very well. If they wouldn't respond to her invitations to meet their responsibilities for their own sense of self-worth, she would try other means.
"Needless to say, this will leave us with a great many commitments, many of them mutually contradictory. This, however, is a Queen's ship. We will discharge our responsibilities, or I will know the reason why. Is that clear?"
Those cold brown eyes seemed to impale each of them in turn, and McKeon moved slightly in his chair as they lingered on him. His chin rose, but he said nothing, and she nodded.
"Good. In that case, let's move on to precisely what our duties and responsibilities are, shall we?"
She punched buttons on her terminal at the head of the conference table, and a small-scale holo display of the Basilisk System bloomed above it. She manipulated more buttons, and a bright red cursor blinked to life.
"We have a single ship, ladies and gentlemen, and our problem, in the simplest terms, is that one ship can be in only one place at a time. The Fleet is responsible for supporting Basilisk Control in management of Junction through traffic, including customs inspections as required. In addition, we are responsible for inspection of all traffic with Medusa itself or with the planet's orbital facilities, for supporting the Resident Commissioner and her Native Protection Agency police, for safeguarding all extraMedusan visitors to the planet, and for insuring the security of this system against all external threats. To accomplish this, we must be here—" the cursor blinked in orbital proximity to Medusa "—here—" it blinked amid the flowing beads of traffic around the junction terminus "—and, in fact, here." The cursor swept a wide circuit of the system, right on the twenty-light-minute radius of a G5 star's hyper limit.
She let the red light circle the holo display's central star for several seconds, then killed the cursor and folded her hands before her on the tabletop.
"Obviously, ladies and gentlemen, a single light cruiser can't be in all those places at once. Nonetheless, I have my orders from Captain Young, and I will discharge them."
McKeon sat silent, staring at her in disbelief. She couldn't be serious! As she herself had just proven, no single ship could discharge them.
But she obviously meant to try, and his cheeks burned as he realized what she'd been doing in her quarters over the three hours since her return from Warlock. She'd been tackling her impossible assignment by herself, wrestling with it without even attempting to involve her officers in its solution, for they'd proven that she couldn't. He'd proven that she couldn't.
His hands gripped together under the edge of the table. The final responsibility would have been Harrington's in any case, but captains had officers—and especially first officers—specifically to help them in situations like this. More, McKeon had already grasped the malice behind her new orders. He'd suspected there was something between her and Young; now he knew there was. Young was running a grave risk with his own career by quitting his station, though it seemed likely he had the patronage and influence to stave off outright disaster. But if Harrington failed to discharge the responsibilities he'd dumped on her, however impossible ...
He shivered internally and made himself concentrate on her words.
"Lieutenant Venizelos."
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"You will select thirty-five ratings and one junior officer for detached duty. Fearless will escort Warlock to the terminus. As soon as Warlock has departed, I will drop you, your chosen personnel, and both pinnaces. You will rendezvous with Basilisk Control and assume the duties of customs and security officer for the terminus traffic. You will be attached to Basilisk Control for that purpose until further notice. Understood?"
Venizelos gawked at her for a moment, and even McKeon blinked. It was unheard of! But it might just work, he admitted almost unwillingly. Unlike cutters, pinnaces were large enough to mount impeller drives and inertial compensators, and they were armed. Their weapons might be popguns and slingshots compared to regular warships, but they were more than sufficient to police unarmed merchantmen.
Yet Venizelos was only a lieutenant, and he would be ten hours' com time from his commanding officer. He'd be entirely on his own, and one wrong decision on his part could ruin not only his own career but Harrington's, as well, which certainly explained his white, strained expression.
The Captain sat motionless, eyes on Venizelos's face, and her mouth tightened ominously. One tapering forefinger tapped the tabletop gently, and the tactical officer shook himself visibly.
"Uh, yes, Ma'am! Understood."
"Good." Honor regarded him levelly for another moment, tasting his anxiety and uncertainty, and made herself step firmly on her compassion. She was throwing him into the deep end, but she'd been three years younger than he was now when she assumed command of LAC 113. And, she thought mordantly, if he screwed up, Pavel Young and his cronies would see to it that she paid the price for it, not Venizelos. Not that she intended to tell the lieutenant that.
"I will leave you detailed instructions," she told him, relenting just a bit, and he sighed in what he clearly thought was unobtrusive relief, then stiffened again as she added, "but I will expect you to exercise your own discretion and initiative as the situation requires."
He nodded again, unhappily, and she turned her hard eyes on Dominica Santos.
"Commander Santos."
"Yes, Captain?" The lieutenant commander looked much calmer than Venizelos had, possibly because she knew there was no way Honor would detail her chief engineer for detached duty.
"I want you to confer with Lieutenant Venizelos before his departure. Get with the exec, as well. Before the lieutenant leaves us, I want a complete inventory of our on-hand recon drones."
She paused, and Santos nodded as she tapped a note into her memo pad.
"Yes, Ma'am. May I ask the purpose of the inventory?"
"You may. Once you've completed it, I want you and your department to begin stripping the sensor heads from the missile bodies in order to fit them with simple station-keeping drives and astrogation packages." This time Santos looked up quickly, her composure noticeably cracked. "I imagine we can do the job by swapping the sensor heads into standard warning and navigation beacons. If not, I want a design for a system that will work on my desk by thirteen hundred."
She locked eyes with the engineer, and Santos flinched. She hid her dismay well, but Honor could almost feel her racing thoughts as the magnitude of her task loomed before her. Just the man-hours involved were daunting, and if she had to design from scratch ...
"As soon as we've dropped Lieutenant Venizelos and his party," Honor continued in that same flat, cool voice, "Fearless will begin a globular sweep pattern ten light-minutes from Basilisk. Lieutenant Stromboli—" the astrogator started in his chair as her glance moved to him "—will work out a least-time course for us, and we will deploy our drones as stationary sensor platforms. I realize that we will almost certainly have insufficient drones for complete coverage, but we'll concentrate on the ecliptic. We can't make patrol sweeps by the book with only one ship, but we can cover the most likely approach vectors."
"You want us to fit all of them with station-keeping drives, Ma'am?" Santos asked after a moment.
"That's what I said, Commander."
"But—" The engineer caught Honor's glacial glance and changed what she'd been about to say. "I expect you're right about fitting the sensor heads into standard beacon kits, Ma'am, but the numbers you're talking about are going to clean out our kits in a hurry. We're going to have to scratch-build an awful lot of drives and astro packs. That's not going to be cheap, and I don't even know if we have sufficient spares aboard."
"What we don't have, we'll fabricate. What we can't fabricate, we'll requisition from Basilisk Control. What we can't requisition, we'll steal." Honor bared her teeth in a humorless smile. "Is that clear, Commander Santos?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"A point, Captain," McKeon heard himself say, and Harrington's eyes whipped to his face. They seemed to harden a bit more, but there was wariness—and perhaps a trace of surprise—in them, as well.
"Yes, Exec?"
"I'm not certain how many probes we have in stores, Ma'am, but I am certain you're right about our inability to achieve complete coverage even if we can—I mean, even after we have fitted them all with station-keeping drives." He was speaking stiffly, and he knew it, but he was also contributing to the solution of a problem for the first time since Harrington had come on board. It felt ... odd. Unnatural.
"And?" the captain prompted him.
"We also have the problem of their endurance, Ma'am. They were never intended for long-term deployment like this. But we might be able to increase their effective time on station by setting them for burst activation. They've got a passive detection range of just over twenty light-minutes against an active impeller drive. If they're on the ten-light-minute shell, they'll have a reach of over half a light-hour from the primary—call it forty minutes' flight time."
Honor nodded. The best radiation and particle shielding available still limited a ship to a maximum speed of .8 c in normal space.
"If we set them to come up for, say, thirty seconds every half-hour, they should detect any incoming vessel under power in normal space at least twenty light-minutes out. That should give us sufficient time to respond, and at the same time increase their endurance by a factor of sixty."
"An excellent suggestion, Exec." Honor smiled at him, grateful that he'd finally come out of his shell, and his facial muscles twitched as if to return it. But then they stiffened again, as if he regretted his momentary lapse, and she smothered a frown of her own.
"Lieutenant Venizelos." The tactical officer looked positively harried as she turned back to him, and her smothered frown turned into a smothered smile at his expression.
"Yes, Ma'am?"
"Lieutenant Cardones will be taking over your responsibilities in your absence. In addition to your other duties before departure, I want you to get with him and work out the optimum drone deployment based on the availability figures I feel certain Commander Santos and Commander McKeon will have for you within the hour."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Very well. Now, once we've detached the pinnaces and deployed our drones, I intend to place Fearless in Medusa orbit. It will be necessary for me to meet and confer with the Resident Commissioner as soon as possible, which will, of course, require a visit to the planet. In addition, however, the detachment of our pinnaces will force us to rely on our cutters for all inspections of space-to-surface and orbit-to-orbit trade. Since they do not have impellers, we may be required to use Fearless herself to move them from orbit to orbit in order to cover all targets. Moreover, the planet lies within three light-minutes of the inner edge of our drone deployment, and our onboard sensors have far more reach than the drones will. By remaining in Medusa orbit, we will be so positioned as to allow our sensors to cover the most critical spatial volume of our responsibilities and also free drones to thicken other portions of the net. I'll want at least one drone reserved to cover the planet if we leave orbit, as I intend to run periodic sweeps of the inner system, if possible, but I'm afraid we'll find ourselves too busy to make many of them. Is all this understood?"
She sat back and swept them with her eyes. Most of them nodded; none shook their heads.
"Excellent. In that case—"
"Ah, Captain?"
"Yes, Lieutenant Venizelos?"
"Something just occurred to me, Ma'am. Commander McKeon's right about the probe endurance, and even without that consideration, getting the kind of coverage you're talking about would be a real problem with the numbers we have aboard. We could get a lot better density if we asked Warlock to drop off any she can spare. I mean, it's not like she's going to be needing them in Manticore."
"I appreciate the suggestion," Honor said in an absolutely toneless voice, "but I'm afraid it's impractical. We'll just have to do the best we can from our own resources."
"But, Captain—"
"I said it's impractical, Lieutenant." Her voice was even flatter than before, its very lack of expression a warning, and Venizelos closed his mouth with a snap. He shot a helpless, sidelong glance at McKeon, but the exec didn't even blink. He'd already noted that Harrington planned to detach her pinnaces after the heavy cruiser—and Young—had departed. Now her response to Venizelos confirmed his reading of the situation. Whatever the source of the bad blood between her and Young, it was nasty enough for him to deliberately set her up for disaster ... and for her to see it coming. And to take steps against it only after he was no longer in a position to frustrate them.
All of which sounded ominously as though HMS Fearless — and her officers — might just find themselves caught in the crossfire.
Honor watched her executive officer's masklike expression and guessed was going on behind it. He was right, of course—and so was Venizelos. She deeply regretted having stepped on the tactical officer so hard, especially when he'd only offered the sort of suggestion she'd practically prayed for her officers to make, but she couldn't explain the enmity between her and Young. Even if it hadn't been unthinkable for any CO to reveal such things to her subordinates, it would have sounded entirely too much like petulant whining.
"Are there any other comments or suggestions?" she asked after a moment. There were none, and she nodded.
"I will announce our new orders and responsibilities to the ship's company at fourteen hundred. Lieutenant Venizelos, I'll want a list of the personnel you want for your party by thirteen hundred. Commander McKeon will vet them before you submit them to me, but I want final approval made before I address the crew."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Very well, ladies and gentlemen. You have your instructions. Let's be about them."
She nodded, and they rose and hurried from the compartment. They didn't look very happy, but at least they were actively engaged with their duties for the first time in far too long. Perhaps it was a good sign.
The hatch closed behind the last of them, and she put her elbows on the table and buried her face in her palms, massaging her temples with her fingertips. God, she hoped it was a good sign! She'd done her best to radiate confidence, but a terrifying number of things could go wrong. Merchant skippers could be prickly about their right of passage, and Venizelos might well provoke an interstellar incident if he pressed the wrong captain too hard. Even with McKeon's suggestion, the endurance of their cobbled-up sensor platforms would be frighteningly limited. They might last the three months until Warlock returned—with luck—if Young didn't find some excuse to extend his "refit" even further. And, worst of all, all of her plans counted on nothing going seriously wrong anywhere. If something did break, she had an excellent chance of knowing about it, but she had an even better chance of being in entirely the wrong place to do anything to stop it.
She sighed and straightened, then lowered her hands to the table and stared long and hard at their backs.
In the final analysis, everything depended on her crew, and she hated to think about the strain she was about to impose upon them. Marines would be of limited utility to Venizelos, so the tactical officer would almost certainly ask solely for naval ratings. That meant he would be taking almost ten percent of Fearless's ship's company with him, and she would have a very hard time denying him the best ten percent, with the most small-craft experience. Her own customs parties for orbital traffic would have to come from what was left, and she'd already noted an appalling number of merchantmen in Medusa orbit. What they could be finding to trade with the aborigines was beyond her imagination, but they were clearly trading a lot of something, and it would be her duty to check every one of those ships.
It would be tempting, she knew, to settle for a simple examination of their manifests, but that wasn't what the Fleet expected of her. Manifest checks would do for through traffic entering the system only to transit the Junction; in the case of vessels trading with Manticoran territory, however, or those transshipping cargo here, she was supposed to inspect the cargo shuttles and ships themselves for contraband. That meant long, grueling hours for her people, and each inspection party would require an officer or senior petty officer to command it.
Even if she had to make no other detachments, that was going to leave her chronically shorthanded, and she could almost see the domino effect rippling towards her. Too few people meant longer watches, less free time, and more resentment from a crew that was already hostile at a time when she needed absolute top effort from everyone on board.
She sighed again and stood, looking around the empty compartment. So be it. Her own nature and all of her training cried out for her to lead, but if leadership failed she would cajole, kick, bully, or terrorize. One way or the other, whatever it took, she would get it done.
They could hate her guts all they liked as long as they did their duty.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Captain Michel Reynaud, Manticore Astro-Control Service, stood at Commander Arless's shoulder and watched his display with mixed emotions as HMS Fearless held position near Basilisk Control and the heavy cruiser Warlock slid into the heart of the terminus. The heavier ship's Warshawski sails glowed brilliantly for just a moment, and then she vanished, and Reynaud was scarcely sorry to see her go. Of all the half-assed, over-bred, arrogant cretins the Royal Manticoran Navy had ever assigned to watch over Reynaud's domain, Lord Pavel Young had to have been the worst. He'd never bothered to veil his contempt for the ACS in the slightest, and Reynaud and his people had reciprocated with feeling.
But for all that, Young had been a known evil, one they'd grown accustomed to working around. Now they had a new one to worry about.
The Astro-Control Service was a civil service organization, despite its uniform and naval ranks, and Reynaud was profoundly grateful for it as he gazed at the remaining cruiser's light code. He was responsible for the smooth running of the terminus' traffic, period. The rest of the Basilisk System was the Navy's concern, and the thought of what now faced that single ship's commanding officer was enough to make Reynaud shiver. Not, he thought sourly, that the stupid bastard was likely to deserve his pity. If he was, he wouldn't have been dumped here. That was a given of Basilisk Station, and the personnel of Basilisk Control regarded the dregs with which they had to contend with all the disdain they merited.
He started to turn away, but Arless's voice stopped him.
"Just a sec, Mike. We've got a couple of inbounds from that cruiser."
"What?" Reynaud swung back to the display and frowned. Two drive sources were moving towards Control's sprawling habitat. They were far too small for full-sized ships, but the fact that they were impeller signatures indicated they were larger than most small craft. And that, in turn, suggested they must be pinnaces, but why would pinnaces be heading for his command station?
"What d'you suppose they 're up to?" he asked.
"Damfino." Arless shrugged. He leaned back and cracked the knuckles of his long fingers.
"You mean they didn't file a flight plan?"
"You got it. They—hold on." The controller leaned forward and flipped a switch, shunting his com channels to Reynaud's earbug.
"—ontrol, this is Navy flight Foxtrot-Able-One. Request final approach instructions."
Arless started to reply, but Reynaud stopped him with a raised finger and keyed his own pickup.
"Navy Foxtrot-Able-One, this is Basilisk Control. Please state your intentions."
"Basilisk Control, we are a naval liaison mission. I have on board my recorded orders and an explanatory dispatch for your station commander."
Reynaud and Arless stared at one another, eyebrows raised. It was certainly unorthodox. Liaison mission? What kind of "liaison"? And why all the mystery? Why hadn't they pre-filed a flight plan? The captain shrugged.
"Very well, Navy Foxtrot-Able-One. Make your approach to—" he craned his neck to check Arless's display "—beacon Niner-Four. You'll be met by a guide. Basilisk Control clear."
He killed the circuit and gave Arless an eloquent glance.
"Now just what the hell do you think that was all about, Stu?"
"Beats me, boss," the controller replied, "but look at that."
He gestured at his display, and Reynaud frowned. Even as her pinnaces separated, the light cruiser had swung away from Basilisk Control to go slashing off on a vector for the system primary, and not at the eighty percent power RMN ships normally used. She was ripping along at a full five hundred gravities, and she was already fifty thousand kilometers away at a velocity of over seven hundred KPS.
The station commander scratched his bristly gray hair and sighed. Just when he'd gotten the last uniformed jackass to at least keep his ham-fisted fingers out of Control's pie, this happened. It had taken months to convince Young that his condescending attempts to rearrange Control's well-tried traffic lanes into more "efficient" routes—so poorly designed they could only increase the workloads of Reynaud's already over-worked controllers while decreasing safety margins—were neither required nor desired. Managing wormhole junction traffic was a job for well-trained, highly experienced professionals, not twits who'd been exiled for how poorly they did their own jobs. There were lots of things the Navy could have done to facilitate ACS's routine operations if the over-bred fart had been interested in doing anything that would have required any effort on his part. He hadn't been, but the tin-god aspect of his personality had been pronounced. As far as Reynaud had been able to tell, Young was simply incapable of watching someone else get on with his job in an orderly fashion as long as he could interfere without exerting himself. He'd rubbed Reynaud wrong from the beginning, and the chief controller had found himself going out of his way to rub right back—with a predictable loss of efficiency he couldn't quite regret, however hard he tried.
But it appeared Young's replacement was cut from different cloth. The problem was that Reynaud didn't know what sort of cloth. Judging by the speed with which he moved, the newcomer certainly seemed to have more energy than his predecessor, but that could be good or bad. If he actually intended to assist Control, it was probably good, yet long and bitter experience made it difficult for Reynaud to visualize a senior naval officer who did more good than harm.
He shrugged. Whatever Fearless's CO had in mind, the cruiser's rapid departure made it clear he intended to dump this "liaison mission" on Reynaud for the long haul, and his total lack of warning as to his intentions was peculiar, to say the very least.
He frowned again, but there was a speculative light in his eyes as he watched the light cruiser lope away. Whatever else that captain was, he clearly wasn't another Lord Pavel Young.
"Do you have our sweep pattern plotted, Astrogation?"
"Yes, Ma'am." Lieutenant Stromboli looked up at Honor's question. His fleshy face was drawn with weariness, for Santos and McKeon had kept revising their drone availability numbers on him. Every time they'd changed their figures, he'd had to recalculate almost from scratch, but tired or no, he never—ever—again meant to tell Captain Harrington he didn't have the course she needed. "We have a vector change in—" he double-checked his panel "—twenty-three minutes. We should deploy the first drone eight hours and forty-two minutes after that."
"Good. Pass the course change to Maneuvering." Nimitz "bleeked" softly in her ear, and she reached up to stroke his head. The treecat always seemed to know when it was time for him to be seen and not heard, even on the bridge, but he'd started sounding far more cheerful from the moment HMS Warlock disappeared. Honor knew why that was, and she allowed herself a small smile before she punched up Engineering.
She got one of Santos's assistants and waited patiently while the chief engineer was summoned to the com. Santos looked awful when she finally appeared. Her dark hair was gathered in a tight braid, her face was tired, and there was a smudge of grease down her right cheek.
"We'll be beginning drone deployment in approximately nine hours, Commander. What's our status?"
"The first pattern is almost ready to deploy now, Ma'am," Santos replied wearily, "and I think we'll have the second one by the time you need it, but I'm not sure about number three."
"Problems, Commander?" Honor asked mildly, and saw Santos's eyes flash with anger. Good. If her officers got mad enough, they might start thinking for a change instead of simply feeling sorry for themselves. But the lieutenant commander bit back what she wanted to say and exhaled sharply.
"I'm concerned about fatigue, Captain." Her voice was flat. "We're already running out of beacon kits, and the kits were never intended to deploy sensor heads of this size and sensitivity. Adapting them to fit requires modifications far outside the normal repair and maintenance parameters, and that limits the utility of our servomechs. We're doing a lot of hand-wiring and grunt work down here, we only have so many sets of hands, and it's going to get worse as the kits run out."
"Understood, Commander, but timing is critical to an orderly deployment. I advise you to expedite."
Honor cut the circuit and leaned back in her command chair with a tiny smile, and Nimitz rubbed his head against the side of her neck while he purred.
"You're what?" Captain Reynaud demanded, and Lieutenant Andreas Venizelos wrinkled his brow in puzzlement.
"I said I'm your customs and security officer, Captain. I'm sure Captain Harrington's dispatch will explain everything."
Reynaud accepted the message chip almost numbly, and Venizelos's puzzlement deepened. He couldn't understand why the ACS man looked so confused. It wasn't as if Venizelos were using any big words.
"Let me get this straight," Reynaud said after a moment. "Your Captain Harrington actually expects you and your people to be quartered here at Control? He means to leave you here to support our operations?"
"Yes, Sir, she does." The darkly handsome lieutenant stressed the pronoun's gender, and Reynaud nodded, but he still looked so dumbfounded Venizelos was moved to continue. "Why do you seem so surprised, Sir?"
"Surprised?" Reynaud shook himself, then smiled oddly. "Yes, I suppose `surprised' is a pretty good word, Lieutenant. Let me just put it this way. I've been chief controller in Basilisk for almost twenty months. Before that, I was senior assistant controller for damn near two years, and in all that time, you're the first—what did you call it? security and customs officer?—anyone's bothered to assign me. In fact, you may be the first one any station commander's ever bothered to assign to Control."
"I'm what?" Venizelos blurted, then flushed as he realized how exactly his tone matched Reynaud's original emphasis. The two of them stared at one another, and then the ACS captain began to grin.
"Now that I think about it," he said, "I believe I did read something in my original orders about the Navy being responsible for inspections and station security. Of course, it's been so long I can't be certain." He glanced at the habitat services tech standing at his shoulder. "Jayne, do me a favor and find the lieutenant's people some quarters and get them checked out on the basic emergency procedures, would you? I've got some station regs to plow through to find out what the hell we're supposed to do with them."
"Sure thing, Mike." The tech gestured to Ensign Wolversham, Venizelos's second in command, and Reynaud turned back to Venizelos, still grinning.
"In the meantime, Lieutenant, perhaps you'd care to join me in my data search?" Venizelos nodded, and Reynaud's grin grew broader. "And perhaps you'd care to tell me a little something about your CO, as well. But take it slow, please. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I don't know if I'm ready for the concept of a competent senior officer on Basilisk Station!"
Andreas Venizelos grinned back, and for the first time in weeks, it felt completely natural.
Lieutenant Commander Dominica Santos tried not to swear as Lieutenant Manning handed her the latest projection.
They'd made the captain's deadline for the first three drone drops, but she was already heading for the fourth, and Santos glared at the chronometer with something like desperation. Less than six hours before they began deployment, and they had barely sixty percent of the drones switched over. They were losing ground steadily; there were five more drops to go; her people were drunk with fatigue; and, worse yet, they'd just run out of beacon kits. From here on out, they were going to have to build the damned conversion sets before they could even put the sensor heads into them!
She muttered resentfully to herself, compromising between bile and naval propriety by cursing too softly for anyone else to hear. What the hell was Harrington's problem?! If she were only willing to give Engineering two or three days, they could design a conversion set the maintenance and repair servomechs could turn out by the gross. As it was, laying out the design and troubleshooting the servomech software would take longer than building the goddamned things by hand! The captain didn't have to drive them this hard—and it wasn't fair for her to take out her own frustration with Young (whatever that was about!) on them.
She stopped swearing and looked around a bit guiltily. It hadn't exactly been fair of them to take out their resentment over the Fleet maneuvers on the captain, either, she supposed. And, she admitted unwillingly, she'd been as bad as the rest of them when it came to dragging around afterward— especially after she learned about their transfer to Basilisk Station. But still ...
She flopped back in her chair and made herself draw a deep breath. All right. Fair or unfair didn't really come into it just now. She had a problem. She could either screen the Captain and tell her she couldn't make her deadline (and that thought wasn't at all attractive), or she could decide that she was chief engineer aboard this bucket of bolts and figure out how to solve it.
She swiveled the chair to face her terminal and began tapping keys. Okay. They couldn't make it if they built the beacon bodies entirely from scratch, and they didn't have time to design a new one, but ... suppose they used the targeting bus from a Mark Fifty missile? If they yanked the warhead and sidewall penaids, they could jigger the sensor heads and astro packs into the empty spots—
No, wait! If they pulled the penaids, they should be able to convert the terminal guidance units from the same missiles into astro packs! That would save components all down the line, and the guidance units would just have to go into storage if they didn't use them. The bus thrusters wouldn't have anywhere near the endurance of a standard beacon kit, but they had power to burn, and the platforms only had to do their job for a couple of months. They weren't going to be moving around, so they wouldn't really need tons of endurance, either, now would they? And if she used standard components, she could use her missile maintenance mechs to do two-thirds of the work in a quarter of the time without any reprogramming at all!
Now, let's see... . If she sectioned the bus off here to clear the passive receptor arrays, then took out this panel to mate the signal booster with the main ECM emitter, then she could...
Lieutenant Commander Santos's fingers flew over her console with gathering speed, and a whole new sensor platform took shape on her display.
"Captain Harrington?"
Honor raised her eyes from the message board in her lap. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Rafael Cardones, Venizelos's assistant and now Fearless's acting Tactical Officer, stood at her elbow, his painfully young face anxious.
"Yes, Lieutenant?"
"Uh, I think we have a problem, Ma'am," Cardones said uncomfortably. Honor raised an eyebrow, and he flinched. "It's, uh, it's the drones, Ma'am."
"What about them, Lieutenant?"
"I, well, you see— That is—" The young officer stopped and visibly took a grip on himself. "I'm afraid I misprogrammed the sensor parameters, Ma'am," he admitted in a rush. "I set them up for directional, not omnidirectional, and I, well, I think I made a little mistake in their telemetry packages, too. I ... I can't seem to access them to accept remote reprogramming, Ma'am."
"I see." Honor leaned back in her chair and propped her elbows on its armrests, steepling her fingers under her chin. The lieutenant looked like a puppy waiting to be kicked. Worse, he looked like a puppy who thought he deserved to be kicked. His humiliation was obvious, and she wanted to pat his head and tell him everything would be all right, but she stepped on the surge of compassion.
"Well, Lieutenant," she went on after a moment, "what do you suggest we do about it?"
"Me, Ma'am?" Cardones almost squeaked. "I don't—" He stopped and inhaled. "I suppose we'll have to pick them up and reprogram, Ma'am," he said at last.
"Not acceptable," Honor said coolly. He stared at her in consternation, and she had to bite her tongue rather firmly. A more experienced tactical officer would already have seen the solution. Recon probe sensor heads were designed to tie directly into their mother ship's tactical data net, and the tac channel was dedicated. It couldn't have been affected by any mistakes he'd made in his telemetry programming because it was hardwired to prevent that very accident. Going in through the tac channel would be difficult—more because of the time involved than because of the task's complexity—but it would allow the standard telemetry to be accessed and even completely reprogrammed from Cardones' console through the CIC update links.
Honor knew that, but she had no intention of telling him so. He should have known to approach McKeon before exposing himself to his captain's wrath—and McKeon should have supervised an officer this junior more closely in the first place. It was a point she intended to make—with both of them—in a fashion she hoped would stick.
"Well, Lieutenant?" she said at length. He blinked. "How do you intend to fix the problem?"
"I don't—" He stopped himself again and glanced away for a moment, then looked back at her. "Do ... Would the Captain care to make a suggestion, Ma'am?"
"I would not." He wilted under her cool soprano, and she struggled to keep her compassion out of her eyes. "You're Tactical Officer aboard this ship, Mr. Cardones," she went on, her voice equally devoid of condemnation or sympathy. "The drones' programming was your responsibility. So is the correction of your problem. Deal with it, Lieutenant."
He gave her one more appealing look, then swallowed and nodded.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said in a tiny voice.
HMS Fearless made her final heading change and settled into the groove, decelerating for a smooth orbital insertion. Honor was back on the bridge, watching Medusa swell in the visual display and feeling the change in the atmosphere about her. The apathy of their arrival here had faded, and if it hadn't been replaced by the esprit de corps she might have wished for, her crew's current attitude was at least a vast improvement.
The last six days had been rough for everyone ... and a close approximation to Hell for some. Lieutenant Commander Santos had good justification for her exhaustion. She'd practically driven her people with a whip when it became obvious Honor had no intention of slowing her drone deployment, but she'd driven herself even harder, and to her own amazement, she'd met every deadline. That last-minute design improvisation of hers had been little short of brilliant, and the drones were in place now. Dangerous holes remained, but at least Honor had a warning net covering seventy degrees either side of the ecliptic, and Santos seemed to be having some difficulty deciding whether she was more proud of her department's achievements or infuriated by her captain's demands.
Nor was she the only one caught between pride and resentment. Lieutenant Cardones, probably more to his own surprise than anyone else's, had actually managed to correct his mistakes with the drone programming. He'd been forced to go to McKeon for help with the remote reprogramming, just as Honor had hoped, and spent endless hours on the project, but he'd dealt with it. And, truth to tell, she was pleased by how well McKeon had responded. As nearly as she could tell, he hadn't raked Cardones over at all, despite what must have been a bitter recognition that he should have kept a closer eye on him in the first place, and from what she'd overheard, he'd subtly directed the youngster into finding the CIC links on his own.
But for all that, Young had been a known evil, one they'd grown accustomed to working around. Now they had a new one to worry about.
The Astro-Control Service was a civil service organization, despite its uniform and naval ranks, and Reynaud was profoundly grateful for it as he gazed at the remaining cruiser's light code. He was responsible for the smooth running of the terminus' traffic, period. The rest of the Basilisk System was the Navy's concern, and the thought of what now faced that single ship's commanding officer was enough to make Reynaud shiver. Not, he thought sourly, that the stupid bastard was likely to deserve his pity. If he was, he wouldn't have been dumped here. That was a given of Basilisk Station, and the personnel of Basilisk Control regarded the dregs with which they had to contend with all the disdain they merited.
He started to turn away, but Arless's voice stopped him.
"Just a sec, Mike. We've got a couple of inbounds from that cruiser."
"What?" Reynaud swung back to the display and frowned. Two drive sources were moving towards Control's sprawling habitat. They were far too small for full-sized ships, but the fact that they were impeller signatures indicated they were larger than most small craft. And that, in turn, suggested they must be pinnaces, but why would pinnaces be heading for his command station?
"What d'you suppose they 're up to?" he asked.
"Damfino." Arless shrugged. He leaned back and cracked the knuckles of his long fingers.
"You mean they didn't file a flight plan?"
"You got it. They—hold on." The controller leaned forward and flipped a switch, shunting his com channels to Reynaud's earbug.
"—ontrol, this is Navy flight Foxtrot-Able-One. Request final approach instructions."
Arless started to reply, but Reynaud stopped him with a raised finger and keyed his own pickup.
"Navy Foxtrot-Able-One, this is Basilisk Control. Please state your intentions."
"Basilisk Control, we are a naval liaison mission. I have on board my recorded orders and an explanatory dispatch for your station commander."
Reynaud and Arless stared at one another, eyebrows raised. It was certainly unorthodox. Liaison mission? What kind of "liaison"? And why all the mystery? Why hadn't they pre-filed a flight plan? The captain shrugged.
"Very well, Navy Foxtrot-Able-One. Make your approach to—" he craned his neck to check Arless's display "—beacon Niner-Four. You'll be met by a guide. Basilisk Control clear."
He killed the circuit and gave Arless an eloquent glance.
"Now just what the hell do you think that was all about, Stu?"
"Beats me, boss," the controller replied, "but look at that."
He gestured at his display, and Reynaud frowned. Even as her pinnaces separated, the light cruiser had swung away from Basilisk Control to go slashing off on a vector for the system primary, and not at the eighty percent power RMN ships normally used. She was ripping along at a full five hundred gravities, and she was already fifty thousand kilometers away at a velocity of over seven hundred KPS.
The station commander scratched his bristly gray hair and sighed. Just when he'd gotten the last uniformed jackass to at least keep his ham-fisted fingers out of Control's pie, this happened. It had taken months to convince Young that his condescending attempts to rearrange Control's well-tried traffic lanes into more "efficient" routes—so poorly designed they could only increase the workloads of Reynaud's already over-worked controllers while decreasing safety margins—were neither required nor desired. Managing wormhole junction traffic was a job for well-trained, highly experienced professionals, not twits who'd been exiled for how poorly they did their own jobs. There were lots of things the Navy could have done to facilitate ACS's routine operations if the over-bred fart had been interested in doing anything that would have required any effort on his part. He hadn't been, but the tin-god aspect of his personality had been pronounced. As far as Reynaud had been able to tell, Young was simply incapable of watching someone else get on with his job in an orderly fashion as long as he could interfere without exerting himself. He'd rubbed Reynaud wrong from the beginning, and the chief controller had found himself going out of his way to rub right back—with a predictable loss of efficiency he couldn't quite regret, however hard he tried.
But it appeared Young's replacement was cut from different cloth. The problem was that Reynaud didn't know what sort of cloth. Judging by the speed with which he moved, the newcomer certainly seemed to have more energy than his predecessor, but that could be good or bad. If he actually intended to assist Control, it was probably good, yet long and bitter experience made it difficult for Reynaud to visualize a senior naval officer who did more good than harm.
He shrugged. Whatever Fearless's CO had in mind, the cruiser's rapid departure made it clear he intended to dump this "liaison mission" on Reynaud for the long haul, and his total lack of warning as to his intentions was peculiar, to say the very least.
He frowned again, but there was a speculative light in his eyes as he watched the light cruiser lope away. Whatever else that captain was, he clearly wasn't another Lord Pavel Young.
"Do you have our sweep pattern plotted, Astrogation?"
"Yes, Ma'am." Lieutenant Stromboli looked up at Honor's question. His fleshy face was drawn with weariness, for Santos and McKeon had kept revising their drone availability numbers on him. Every time they'd changed their figures, he'd had to recalculate almost from scratch, but tired or no, he never—ever—again meant to tell Captain Harrington he didn't have the course she needed. "We have a vector change in—" he double-checked his panel "—twenty-three minutes. We should deploy the first drone eight hours and forty-two minutes after that."
"Good. Pass the course change to Maneuvering." Nimitz "bleeked" softly in her ear, and she reached up to stroke his head. The treecat always seemed to know when it was time for him to be seen and not heard, even on the bridge, but he'd started sounding far more cheerful from the moment HMS Warlock disappeared. Honor knew why that was, and she allowed herself a small smile before she punched up Engineering.
She got one of Santos's assistants and waited patiently while the chief engineer was summoned to the com. Santos looked awful when she finally appeared. Her dark hair was gathered in a tight braid, her face was tired, and there was a smudge of grease down her right cheek.
"We'll be beginning drone deployment in approximately nine hours, Commander. What's our status?"
"The first pattern is almost ready to deploy now, Ma'am," Santos replied wearily, "and I think we'll have the second one by the time you need it, but I'm not sure about number three."
"Problems, Commander?" Honor asked mildly, and saw Santos's eyes flash with anger. Good. If her officers got mad enough, they might start thinking for a change instead of simply feeling sorry for themselves. But the lieutenant commander bit back what she wanted to say and exhaled sharply.
"I'm concerned about fatigue, Captain." Her voice was flat. "We're already running out of beacon kits, and the kits were never intended to deploy sensor heads of this size and sensitivity. Adapting them to fit requires modifications far outside the normal repair and maintenance parameters, and that limits the utility of our servomechs. We're doing a lot of hand-wiring and grunt work down here, we only have so many sets of hands, and it's going to get worse as the kits run out."
"Understood, Commander, but timing is critical to an orderly deployment. I advise you to expedite."
Honor cut the circuit and leaned back in her command chair with a tiny smile, and Nimitz rubbed his head against the side of her neck while he purred.
"You're what?" Captain Reynaud demanded, and Lieutenant Andreas Venizelos wrinkled his brow in puzzlement.
"I said I'm your customs and security officer, Captain. I'm sure Captain Harrington's dispatch will explain everything."
Reynaud accepted the message chip almost numbly, and Venizelos's puzzlement deepened. He couldn't understand why the ACS man looked so confused. It wasn't as if Venizelos were using any big words.
"Let me get this straight," Reynaud said after a moment. "Your Captain Harrington actually expects you and your people to be quartered here at Control? He means to leave you here to support our operations?"
"Yes, Sir, she does." The darkly handsome lieutenant stressed the pronoun's gender, and Reynaud nodded, but he still looked so dumbfounded Venizelos was moved to continue. "Why do you seem so surprised, Sir?"
"Surprised?" Reynaud shook himself, then smiled oddly. "Yes, I suppose `surprised' is a pretty good word, Lieutenant. Let me just put it this way. I've been chief controller in Basilisk for almost twenty months. Before that, I was senior assistant controller for damn near two years, and in all that time, you're the first—what did you call it? security and customs officer?—anyone's bothered to assign me. In fact, you may be the first one any station commander's ever bothered to assign to Control."
"I'm what?" Venizelos blurted, then flushed as he realized how exactly his tone matched Reynaud's original emphasis. The two of them stared at one another, and then the ACS captain began to grin.
"Now that I think about it," he said, "I believe I did read something in my original orders about the Navy being responsible for inspections and station security. Of course, it's been so long I can't be certain." He glanced at the habitat services tech standing at his shoulder. "Jayne, do me a favor and find the lieutenant's people some quarters and get them checked out on the basic emergency procedures, would you? I've got some station regs to plow through to find out what the hell we're supposed to do with them."
"Sure thing, Mike." The tech gestured to Ensign Wolversham, Venizelos's second in command, and Reynaud turned back to Venizelos, still grinning.
"In the meantime, Lieutenant, perhaps you'd care to join me in my data search?" Venizelos nodded, and Reynaud's grin grew broader. "And perhaps you'd care to tell me a little something about your CO, as well. But take it slow, please. I'm not as young as I used to be, and I don't know if I'm ready for the concept of a competent senior officer on Basilisk Station!"
Andreas Venizelos grinned back, and for the first time in weeks, it felt completely natural.
Lieutenant Commander Dominica Santos tried not to swear as Lieutenant Manning handed her the latest projection.
They'd made the captain's deadline for the first three drone drops, but she was already heading for the fourth, and Santos glared at the chronometer with something like desperation. Less than six hours before they began deployment, and they had barely sixty percent of the drones switched over. They were losing ground steadily; there were five more drops to go; her people were drunk with fatigue; and, worse yet, they'd just run out of beacon kits. From here on out, they were going to have to build the damned conversion sets before they could even put the sensor heads into them!
She muttered resentfully to herself, compromising between bile and naval propriety by cursing too softly for anyone else to hear. What the hell was Harrington's problem?! If she were only willing to give Engineering two or three days, they could design a conversion set the maintenance and repair servomechs could turn out by the gross. As it was, laying out the design and troubleshooting the servomech software would take longer than building the goddamned things by hand! The captain didn't have to drive them this hard—and it wasn't fair for her to take out her own frustration with Young (whatever that was about!) on them.
She stopped swearing and looked around a bit guiltily. It hadn't exactly been fair of them to take out their resentment over the Fleet maneuvers on the captain, either, she supposed. And, she admitted unwillingly, she'd been as bad as the rest of them when it came to dragging around afterward— especially after she learned about their transfer to Basilisk Station. But still ...
She flopped back in her chair and made herself draw a deep breath. All right. Fair or unfair didn't really come into it just now. She had a problem. She could either screen the Captain and tell her she couldn't make her deadline (and that thought wasn't at all attractive), or she could decide that she was chief engineer aboard this bucket of bolts and figure out how to solve it.
She swiveled the chair to face her terminal and began tapping keys. Okay. They couldn't make it if they built the beacon bodies entirely from scratch, and they didn't have time to design a new one, but ... suppose they used the targeting bus from a Mark Fifty missile? If they yanked the warhead and sidewall penaids, they could jigger the sensor heads and astro packs into the empty spots—
No, wait! If they pulled the penaids, they should be able to convert the terminal guidance units from the same missiles into astro packs! That would save components all down the line, and the guidance units would just have to go into storage if they didn't use them. The bus thrusters wouldn't have anywhere near the endurance of a standard beacon kit, but they had power to burn, and the platforms only had to do their job for a couple of months. They weren't going to be moving around, so they wouldn't really need tons of endurance, either, now would they? And if she used standard components, she could use her missile maintenance mechs to do two-thirds of the work in a quarter of the time without any reprogramming at all!
Now, let's see... . If she sectioned the bus off here to clear the passive receptor arrays, then took out this panel to mate the signal booster with the main ECM emitter, then she could...
Lieutenant Commander Santos's fingers flew over her console with gathering speed, and a whole new sensor platform took shape on her display.
"Captain Harrington?"
Honor raised her eyes from the message board in her lap. Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Rafael Cardones, Venizelos's assistant and now Fearless's acting Tactical Officer, stood at her elbow, his painfully young face anxious.
"Yes, Lieutenant?"
"Uh, I think we have a problem, Ma'am," Cardones said uncomfortably. Honor raised an eyebrow, and he flinched. "It's, uh, it's the drones, Ma'am."
"What about them, Lieutenant?"
"I, well, you see— That is—" The young officer stopped and visibly took a grip on himself. "I'm afraid I misprogrammed the sensor parameters, Ma'am," he admitted in a rush. "I set them up for directional, not omnidirectional, and I, well, I think I made a little mistake in their telemetry packages, too. I ... I can't seem to access them to accept remote reprogramming, Ma'am."
"I see." Honor leaned back in her chair and propped her elbows on its armrests, steepling her fingers under her chin. The lieutenant looked like a puppy waiting to be kicked. Worse, he looked like a puppy who thought he deserved to be kicked. His humiliation was obvious, and she wanted to pat his head and tell him everything would be all right, but she stepped on the surge of compassion.
"Well, Lieutenant," she went on after a moment, "what do you suggest we do about it?"
"Me, Ma'am?" Cardones almost squeaked. "I don't—" He stopped and inhaled. "I suppose we'll have to pick them up and reprogram, Ma'am," he said at last.
"Not acceptable," Honor said coolly. He stared at her in consternation, and she had to bite her tongue rather firmly. A more experienced tactical officer would already have seen the solution. Recon probe sensor heads were designed to tie directly into their mother ship's tactical data net, and the tac channel was dedicated. It couldn't have been affected by any mistakes he'd made in his telemetry programming because it was hardwired to prevent that very accident. Going in through the tac channel would be difficult—more because of the time involved than because of the task's complexity—but it would allow the standard telemetry to be accessed and even completely reprogrammed from Cardones' console through the CIC update links.
Honor knew that, but she had no intention of telling him so. He should have known to approach McKeon before exposing himself to his captain's wrath—and McKeon should have supervised an officer this junior more closely in the first place. It was a point she intended to make—with both of them—in a fashion she hoped would stick.
"Well, Lieutenant?" she said at length. He blinked. "How do you intend to fix the problem?"
"I don't—" He stopped himself again and glanced away for a moment, then looked back at her. "Do ... Would the Captain care to make a suggestion, Ma'am?"
"I would not." He wilted under her cool soprano, and she struggled to keep her compassion out of her eyes. "You're Tactical Officer aboard this ship, Mr. Cardones," she went on, her voice equally devoid of condemnation or sympathy. "The drones' programming was your responsibility. So is the correction of your problem. Deal with it, Lieutenant."
He gave her one more appealing look, then swallowed and nodded.
"Yes, Ma'am," he said in a tiny voice.
HMS Fearless made her final heading change and settled into the groove, decelerating for a smooth orbital insertion. Honor was back on the bridge, watching Medusa swell in the visual display and feeling the change in the atmosphere about her. The apathy of their arrival here had faded, and if it hadn't been replaced by the esprit de corps she might have wished for, her crew's current attitude was at least a vast improvement.
The last six days had been rough for everyone ... and a close approximation to Hell for some. Lieutenant Commander Santos had good justification for her exhaustion. She'd practically driven her people with a whip when it became obvious Honor had no intention of slowing her drone deployment, but she'd driven herself even harder, and to her own amazement, she'd met every deadline. That last-minute design improvisation of hers had been little short of brilliant, and the drones were in place now. Dangerous holes remained, but at least Honor had a warning net covering seventy degrees either side of the ecliptic, and Santos seemed to be having some difficulty deciding whether she was more proud of her department's achievements or infuriated by her captain's demands.
Nor was she the only one caught between pride and resentment. Lieutenant Cardones, probably more to his own surprise than anyone else's, had actually managed to correct his mistakes with the drone programming. He'd been forced to go to McKeon for help with the remote reprogramming, just as Honor had hoped, and spent endless hours on the project, but he'd dealt with it. And, truth to tell, she was pleased by how well McKeon had responded. As nearly as she could tell, he hadn't raked Cardones over at all, despite what must have been a bitter recognition that he should have kept a closer eye on him in the first place, and from what she'd overheard, he'd subtly directed the youngster into finding the CIC links on his own.