Badger (12 page)

Nivrosky paused, bowing his head slightly. When he brought his eyes up again, Jacob could see the weariness there, hiding just behind his hard expression. “Lastly, you have my personal thanks for all you have done. It is an honor to lead you into battle, and I assure you our labors will not be in vain. Every sacrifice you have made, and every burden you now bear, allows the people of the Celostian Union to live in freedom and peace. Our children and their children will look on your accomplishments with pride and gratitude.” He saluted them, and the officers rose as one to return the gesture. Jacob felt his heart burn as the High Admiral dropped the salute. “You are dismissed.”

The officers filed out of the conference room, the murmur of small talk ushering them into the corridor. Jacob waited for the first officers to make their way through the hatch, watching as the High Admiral stayed behind. An admiral, apparently the commanding officer of the
Golem
class dreadnaught
Seat
, had approached Nivrosky, and the two were speaking with the ease and informality of old friends who had weathered fire together. Jacob wondered if he would ever have the opportunity to share such a longstanding comradeship, or if his current trend of broken friendships would continue.

He turned back toward the door and saw Leon waiting for him. The High Admiral’s son gave him a curious look, as if he had been expecting something other than what he was seeing. “So?”

Jacob blinked. “So what?”

Leon folded his arms, and his eyes narrowed. “What? No reaction to the fact we’re going to Reefhome? No excitement, no trepidation, nothing at all?”

He shrugged, trying to suppress his discomfort with the situation. “It’s just another assignment, and we’ll only be passing through anyway. It’s not like your father’s going to give us the chance to see the sights while we are preparing to head out on a major operation.” Jacob saw the disappointed expression on Leon’s face, and he tilted his head. “Were you expecting something more, Nivrosky?”

The other officer coughed into a fist as if he wanted to clear his throat. Conveniently, it also meant he had a good reason to avoid Jacob’s eyes. “I might have made a bet with Laurie about your response.”

“Oh really.” Jacob shook his head and grunted. “And who won, Commander?”

Leon spread his hands and sighed. “She did. My Countermeasures officer knows you very, very well, Captain Hull.”

Jacob gave Leon a very unprofessional grin. “Perhaps you’re right. Teaches you to try and outguess a pointer.”

Leon chuckled at the somewhat derisive nickname all Countermeasures crew shared.

A moment later, however, Jacob frowned. “Wait, this means you knew, before you left the ship, that we would be going to Reefhome. You knew it long enough to talk to Laurie about it too.”

Leon’s expression turned chagrined. “I…might have heard about the High Admiral’s plans, and I might have made a few suggestions as to where the flotilla could leave from.”

He gave the commander a cold glare. “When exactly were the two of you going to tell me? Or was it supposed to be a surprise here?”

“Well I did tell you your presence would make supplies from Reefhome easier to come by.” Leon raised his hands when Jacob continued to stare at him. “Okay, okay, I know. I should have told you, but it could have been considered a breech in protocol. I wasn’t supposed to know anything about where we were going until I arrived on
Badger
, just like you.”

“Yet you told Laurie.”

Leon rolled his eyes. “She probably already knew anyway. Isaac’s got his fingers in so many com channels he might have known everything I did.” A shadow of something must have crossed Jacob’s expression, because the other officer stopped. “Is something the matter? What’s going on with Isaac?”

Jacob shook his head. “Lieutenant Bellworth is doing just fine, Leon.”

Rather than accepting the bland explanation, Leon folded his arms again and raised an eyebrow.

With a sigh, Jacob gave up on any hope of keeping the matter quiet. “Things are…difficult…for him and me right now. There was a break-in on the ship, and the intruder used some fairly advanced hacking skills.”

“So he was a suspect.” Leon nodded. “That must have made him unhappy.”

The sympathy in the other officer’s voice only worsened Jacob’s melancholy. “More or less. It seems to be a habit of mine lately.” He brought his eyes up to lock onto Leon’s again. “There is another thing you could have warned me about, by the way.”

The High Admiral’s son had the gall to look confused for a moment, and then his expression cleared. “Oh. Al-shira.”

It was hard to resist slugging the man in the arm, but Jacob reminded himself the High Admiral was only a few feet away. As necessary as Alan Nivrosky thought Jacob would be, it was doubtful he would let him beat on his son while he was in the same conference room. “Yeah, Al-shira. A little advance warning would have been nice, Commander Nivrosky.”

Leon winced. “I didn’t know she would be
that
mad at you, Jacob. I thought she would just want to talk to you about what was going on.” He met Jacob’s eyes steadily. “Although even if I had known what she would do, I still wouldn’t have warned you.”

Jacob tilted his head. “What, you think I somehow earned this?”

The other officer shook his head, but his eyes were still steady. “Yes, in fact, I do.” Before Jacob could respond, Leon held up a hand. His face was the model of official formality. “I don’t know exactly how serious the two of you were before she was reassigned, but it was serious enough the personnel board was worried about it. Now I don’t know everything that went on, but I’d say she deserved at least a letter or two since then.”

His words caught Jacob so much by surprise that he was left staring at Leon with his mouth open. By the time he had recovered the ability to speak, it seemed like an hour had passed. “I have no idea what you’re—”

Leon had refolded his arms, and now he raised a single eyebrow. “Oh really. You’re going to tell me this entire time you’ve never felt anything, at all, for Naomi Al-shira.”

Jacob closed his mouth with a click. “Commander Al-shira was an officer under my command, Leon. If I had felt anything, it would have been a violation of my responsibility as a command officer.”

Leon shook his head. “Fine, then, hide behind that excuse if you want to. Just remember, to the rest of us, what she’s expecting from you really isn’t all that hard to figure out.” Leon glanced to the side, and his mouth twisted. “I believe my father is waiting for me. You have my best wishes in trying to remedy your situation.” With a respectful nod and a quick salute, Leon left.

Jacob stared after him for a few moments, still utterly and completely baffled by the exchange. Then, realizing he was the only officer who had remained behind in the now nearly empty conference room, he turned on his heel and left. The last thing he wanted was for the High Admiral to ask what was wrong.

Of course, it would be nice if he had any idea what the answer to that question was in the first place.

Chapter Seven

For the tenth time that morning, Jacob watched his flagship die and swore to himself.

The rest of the simulation room was empty; apparently it had been reserved for his exclusive use for the entire journey to the fleet’s destination. At the moment, he was more than happy to have the privacy. He watched the rest of his simulated fleet die, ship by ship. With his flagship destroyed, the program would not let him send any more commands, and the formations he had set to face the simulated Odurans were quickly unraveling and faltering. It took only a handful of minutes for his fleet to be scattered in utter and abject defeat.

Not that his commands would have helped. The scenario had not looked pretty from the outset. The opposing fleet had contained nearly twice the number of ships, and most had been of a heavier class than his own. Jacob had no idea how Admiral Nivrosky expected him to do anything against those odds, but he had his assignment. No matter how many times the simulation beat him, he was going to keep trying.

The scenario shifted to the next in the sequence. From what he could tell, there were sixteen different battles laid out for him, and over the past eight days, he had managed to win exactly zero times. Each scenario was a disaster. In one he was heavily outnumbered by the Odurans; in the next, half his ships were so heavily damaged they bled air before the battle even started. In another, his ships were traveling, oblivious, through an asteroid field before they were ambushed by an Oduran task force, while another, and by far the worst, he commanded only four ships in an attempt to hold off two Telosian pirate fleets during a raid on a convoy.

Twice he had sent reports of his progress—or lack thereof—to Admiral Nivrosky. It was humiliating to detail his defeats, but each time he hoped that perhaps the admiral would offer advice, or even critique his efforts. Jacob knew there had to be a way to win or at least to avoid complete failure—but he had no idea how to find it.

His reward both times had been the same: a simple, terse response. “Try again.”

So he would. Jacob gritted his teeth as a clumsy fleet of armed merchantmen faced off against Oduran destroyers. He assigned them formations and watched the battle lines close. Perhaps he could make his ships last at least as long as the last time…

He reached his quarters utterly exhausted. His orders to report to the simulation chamber had been broad enough to allow him time for frequent breaks, but his continued failures tied him to the place as securely as any chain. After eight straight hours of watching his ships blow up, however, it was time for a short rest.

Jacob staggered into his quarters and passed the desk. He deliberately tried to ignore the blinking light that told him messages were waiting for him. Unfortunately, in addition to his simulations, he still had the burden of a squadron command. Every day more updates and reports came from
Beagle
and
Terrier
. While both ships were doing fairly well under the supervision of Commander Flint and Leon’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Burlington, there were always issues that had to be addressed by the squadron’s ranking officer. Of course, since the crew was almost literally under the eye of the High Admiral, very few discipline problems still occurred, but those that did he had to personally attend to. At the very least it was better to be able to deal with those issues here rather than collecting them at the central communications area, as he had to do for the letters his sister Catherine sent him.

The reason for his discomfort there wasn’t hard to figure out. Commander Naomi Al-shira was nearly always there, managing the flow of information that flowed into and out of
Badger
’s circuits. Unlike the
Wolfhound
or other destroyers of her class,
Badger
had a fully staffed center overseeing everything from transmissions to other members of the local squadron to the positioning and riftjumps of messenger drones. It was a position of great trust, since even a single wrong message or a garbled transmission could create severe difficulties for the entire Celostian Navy, and it was obvious from the respect her crew showed her that Naomi had earned their trust.

All of which meant it was even more obvious than usual to the rest of the crew that she and Jacob weren’t on the best of terms. The cold exchanges of conversation, her insistence on phrasing the word ‘captain’ in a way that made him want tear out his hair in rage, even the initial reaction whenever they saw one another was enough to clue the rest of the
Badger
in on the fight. Soon there were officers and crewmen—never more than two or three—who gathered outside the communications center when he usually arrived. He could have sworn they laid bets down on how badly each encounter would go for him, or perhaps on how quickly he could escape the center. Either way Jacob did not like the way they whispered and chuckled when he walked by.

Still, if that had been all he probably would have been able to bear with the whole situation for the duration of their mission. Yet fate seemed determined to throw one last kink in the process, in the form of Commander Kenning. Just the thought of the man made Jacob throw himself on his bed and groan.

The ambitious intelligence officer had been given command of a flight of
Arrowhead
corvettes. While they were much more modern craft than the aging
Defender
class destroyers or Jacob’s modified
Hunter
versions of the same class, it quickly became obvious the young man had expected a more prestigious transfer. Perhaps Upshaw had given him some false hope that Jacob would be dismissed after all, or maybe Jacob had managed to earn the man’s ire all on his own. Whatever the reason, Jacob quickly discovered Kenning was making rounds to turn other officers against him.

Unfortunately, he had a lot to support his efforts. Captain Upshaw was already willing enough to testify against Jacob, given the disastrous intrusion into his quarters as well as their previous poor relationship. Espinoza appeared to agree, and between the three of them, they soon had most of the commanding officers in the flotilla lined up against him. Not that he would have enjoyed talking with many of the other officers, but he still found it frustrating to be shunned at every planning session and roundly ignored outside of them as well. He was sure that if they could guarantee there wouldn’t be any unfortunate casualties besides himself, the lot of them would be more than happy to throw him into the Oduran’s teeth and write him off completely.

Even that might have been endurable if it didn’t seem that he had managed to alienate his few friends. Al-shira had been a given, of course, but Isaac’s and Laurie’s combined resentment over the investigation continued to hound him. Leon seemed isolated more out of awkwardness and some small irritation over Jacob’s relationship with Al-shira, something Jacob steadfastly refused to discuss with Admiral Nivrosky’s son. All in all, it was a disaster almost as bad as the simulator runs; it was rapidly becoming apparent that whatever skill Jacob had in combat was severely lacking when it came to interpersonal skills.