Shadow of Freedom-eARC (56 page)

Harahap considered the odds as he began ladling curry over a plate of rice. Fifty-fifty, he decided. Maybe as high as sixty-forty, his favor, given Indiana’s aggressiveness, but not any better than that. Still, he’d won a lot of bets at worse odds than that, and if this one didn’t work out, all he and his employers lost was the time and the piddling expense of the weapons they’d provided. Whereas if it
did
work…

I can live with fifty-fifty
, he decided.
After all, it won’t be
my
ass, whichever side craps out
.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“I suppose that’s just about it, then.” Michelle Henke tipped back in her, rested her right ankle on her left knee, and clasped her hands behind her head. “Unless anyone else has something they think we should be looking at?”

She looked around the officers gathered at the long table in her dining cabin, most of them sipping coffee or munching their chosen form of fingerfood, and quirked an eyebrow. It was an informal looking group, which wasn’t too surprising, considering the fact that their commanding admiral had chosen to hold it here, rather than in her briefing room…and to attend in her Academy sweats and treecat slippers. None of the others were quite that informal, of course—rank did have its privileges, which none of them were so rash as to usurp, however congenial their CO—but there was still an undeniably casual, comfortable feel to the meeting.

“It looks to me like you’ve covered all the points from the agenda, Ma’am,” Gervais Archer said, consulting his minicomp. Then he smiled wryly. “For that matter, you’ve, ah, hit on at least a few
additional
points.”

Several people chuckled, and Michelle grinned unrepentantly. Organization was a good thing, and she was as organized as anyone until she was certain she’d covered all the points she’d planned on covering. After that, free association was the order of the day as far as she was concerned. In fact, she encouraged it as a way to expose points she hadn’t thought about ahead of time.

“Obsessive organization is the sign of a mind not prepared to thrive upon chaos,” she pointed out, and the chuckles were louder.

“Actually, there is one thing it might be appropriate to bring up, Ma’am,” Veronica Armstrong said after a moment. The flag captain sat at the opposite end of the table from Michelle, flanked by Commander Larson, her executive officer, and Commander Wilton Diego, her tactical officer. At the moment, Armstrong’s green eyes were unwontedly serious, and Michelle frowned mentally.

“Go, Vicki,” she invited.

“Well, I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while,” Armstrong continued with a slight shrug. “The thing is that as honored and pleased as I am to be your flag captain, I have to question whether or not a battlecruiser—even a
Nike
like
Artemis
—is the best place for you to keep your flag. We’ve got two and a half squadrons of modern ships-of-the-wall now, and they’ve not only got better flag deck accommodations, but they’re a hell of a lot tougher, too.”

“Trying to get rid of me, Vicki?” Michelle asked quizzically, and Armstrong shook her head.

“No, Ma’am. Of course not!” She smiled. “I’m just pointing out that a superdreadnought is more traditional for a fleet commander’s flagship. When it’s available, of course.”

“You may have noticed that I’ve never been exactly trammeled by the bonds of tradition,” Michelle said dryly. Then she straightened in her chair, leaned forward, and folded her hands on the table in front of her.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Vicki,” she said in a considerably more serious tone. “And I’ll admit I considered—briefly—whether or not it would be a good idea to move to one of the SD(P)s when they became available. But I decided not to for several reasons. One is that for the immediately foreseeable future, I don’t think the question of survivability really enters the equation. Unless we screw up, the Sollies aren’t going to be able to threaten us significantly. For that matter, even if they manage to get into range, a
Nike
like
Artie
is a hell of a lot better protected against anything but pointblank energy fire than almost anyone else’s ships-of-the-wall.

“There is a little something to be said for the superiority of a superdreadnought’s—what was it you called them?—‘Flag deck accommodations.’” Michelle shrugged. “But that’s mainly a comfort factor and a matter of having more room to pack the admiral and her staff into. The actual command facilities aren’t that much superior to what we’ve got right here aboard
Artie
, and our CIC’s receiving the input from every sensor in the entire fleet.

“The decisive factor, though, is that I’m comfortable aboard your ship, Captain Armstrong.” She smiled. “You and your senior officers are an extension of my staff, and you and I have been thinking together long enough for me to be sure you understand the intent as well as the wording of any order I may give. And while I hesitate to mention it in front of all these awestruck junior officers,” her smile became a grin as she glanced at the other officers seated around the table, “there have been occasions—rare, perhaps, but nonetheless real—upon which you have…respectfully raised considerations which have tempered my own perhaps overly enthusiastic notions. Frankly, I’d just as soon not have to break in another flag captain who’s willing to do that.”

Her whimsical tone became rather more serious with the last sentence, and Armstrong looked down the length of the table at her for a second or two. Then the flag captain nodded, and Michelle nodded back.

I wonder if someone else has been complaining about Vicki’s relative lack of seniority?
she thought.
Funny how people can piss and moan over something like that at a time like this. And it’d be like Vicki to offer me a way to make the move without looking like I’m conceding anything to the complainer. Or like a lack of confidence in
her
, for that matter
.

She made a mental note to have Cynthia Lecter look into the matter quietly. She didn’t expect to discover anything like a serious problem, but it never hurt to be proactive about things like that. Shrinking violets, by and large, didn’t make it to flag rank. Overall, that was a good thing, but ego involvement was one of the most pernicious producers of friction, and one with which Michelle had never sympathized.

And I’m not about to discombobulate my command arrangements at a time like this, especially if it’s just somebody with a nose bent out of shape because she’s senior to Vicki and thinks
she
ought to be Tenth Fleet’s flag captain!

She snorted mentally at the thought. In less than one T-day, Tenth Fleet would be dropping out of hyper in the Meyers System.
Not
a good time to be tinkering with its command structure.

“All right, people,” she said out loud. “Now that that particular pressing question has been dealt with, I think it’s time all of us got some sleep.” She smiled again, this time without any humor at all. “After all, we’re likely to be just a bit
busy
tomorrow.”

* * *

“Oh,
shit
.”

“What was that?” CPO Sylvia Chu, chief of the watch in Meyers Astro Control, looked up from the endless stream of memos and directives on her own display with a stab of irritation as she heard the soft, fervent mutter. Commodore Thurgood’s upcoming exercise loomed large in Chu’s thoughts at the moment, and she needed to get her paperwork at least under control (she was never going to get it
finished
; that was a given in the Navy) to clear the decks for it. As Lieutenant Bristow had pointed out to her only that morning, screwing up the exercise because they’d missed dotting some “i” or crossing some “t” would constitute a Bad Thing.

And so would a last-minute sensor snafu, which was why the comment from Petty Officer 2/C Alan Coker, who was currently manning the outer system surveillance platforms, had set off Chu’s internal alarms. The outer platforms were even more urgently in need of upgrade and replacement than the
inner
platforms, and the
last thing she needed with the exercise looming on the horizon was for one of her primary sensor nodes to report a malfunction. That would
not
look good on her next efficiency report…which was due in less than two T-months.

There was no immediate response to her question, and she frowned as Coker leaned closer to his own console. Coker could be a royal pain in the ass, but although she would have gone far out of her way to avoid admitting it, Chu regarded him as one of the three best sensor techs assigned to the Meyers System. His defects—and the reason someone of his ability was still only a second-class petty officer—stemmed from a certain lack of patience with officers in general coupled with what Chu thought of as the “old Frontier Fleet hand” syndrome. Coker had seen more incompetent officers with family connections than he could have counted come and go during his career, and he’d spent more than his fair share of time cleaning up after them. It gave him an edge of something entirely too much like insolence towards the commissioned nitwits who came his way, but his decades of service had also made him very good at his job. He was, quite literally, too valuable to be canned.

Which was why his present expression sent another, sharper tremor of unease through Chu’s professional instincts.

Coker’s hands moved across his console for several seconds, obviously double checking and refining whatever had drawn his attention. Then he straightened and looked at Chu.

“We are
so
screwed,” he said flatly.

“I realize you have a reputation to maintain as a character,” Chu replied tartly. “But unless you want to be ripped a new one, I’d appreciate a report one hell of a lot more detailed than ‘We are so screwed.’”

“Sorry about that, Chief.” His smile was a grimace, but there was also genuine apology in it. “It’s just—” He gestured at his display. “The outer platforms are calling it twenty-eight superdreadnoughts, Chief.” He shook his head. “And whoever they are, they sure as hell aren’t ours!”

* * *

“It’s confirmed, Commodore,” Captain Thora Macpherson said flatly. “Definitely twenty-eight in the superdreadnought range, judging from their impeller signatures. Not only that, but their accel inbound is over five hundred and thirty KPS squared.” A smile as grim as her tone flitted across her face. “They haven’t said anything to us yet, but given that number and that accel, there’s not much question who they are.”

Commodore Thurgood nodded, not that he’d really needed his operations officer’s last sentence. For that matter, he hadn’t needed the acceleration rate. There was no way in hell anybody he
wanted
to see would be sending that many ships-of-the-wall to a miserable, back-of-beyond system like Meyers, and that left only one candidate.

“Well, that’s a pisser,” Captain Hideoshi Wayne, Thurgood’s chief of staff, observed.

“You do have a way with words, don’t you, Hideoshi?”

“Sorry, Sir.” Wayne grimaced.

“You didn’t say anything I’m not thinking,” Thurgood confessed with a sigh. He shook his head. “I’ve warned Verrocchio and Hongbo something like this could happen, but I have to admit I didn’t really expect it. And I’d never have expected them to arrive in this kind of strength!”

He twitched his head in the direction of the master display. It was currently set to astrographic mode, showing the entire star system. The G0 star’s twenty-two-light-minute hyper limit was represented by a green sphere, and a glowing rash of red icons was just about to cross into it, headed for the inner system.

There were a lot of them.

“It does seem like using a sledgehammer to swat flies,” Howell Chavez, CO of SLNS
Edgehill
, Thurgood’s battlecruiser flagship, agreed. Thurgood glanced at the com display which linked his flag bridge to Chavez’ command deck, and the flag captain chuckled humorlessly. “I mean, I’m flattered and everything, Sir, but it
is
a little excessive, don’t you think?”

“It’s possible they think we’ve been reinforced,” Wayne said, but Thurgood shook his head.

“Possible, but not too damned likely. Not way the hell and gone out here.”

“Then why do you think they brought along so much heavy metal, Sir?” the chief of staff asked.

“Aside from the obvious, you mean?” Thurgood smiled thinly. “Your guess is as good as mine, Howell.”

“Actually, Sir, I might have an idea,” Captain Merriman said quietly, and all eyes turned to the petite, fine-boned intelligence officer. It was an open secret, at least among Thurgood’s staff officers, that he and Sadako Merriman were lovers. That was too common in the Solarian League Navy to merit comment, except that in this case Merriman had become Thurgood’s intelligence specialist on the basis of raw ability well before she’d become his lover.

“Fire away, Sadako,” he invited now. “We’ve got better than three hours before they get here, after all.”

“It’s just a theory, of course, Sir,” Merriman said, “but I’ve been thinking a lot about Gold Peak’s character ever since Admiral Byng ran into her in New Tuscany. She’s perfectly willing to kill anybody she has to—what happened in Spindle’s proof enough of that, too, I suppose. But I think she’d prefer not to kill anyone she
doesn’t
have to, as well. In fact, Spindle’s part of the reason I think that. She could’ve gone right on shooting without allowing Admiral O’Cleary to surrender, just like she could have taken out Admiral Byng’s entire task force. She chose not to.”

She shrugged.

“And?” Wayne prompted.

“And I think she deliberately brought along enough firepower to make it obvious to
anyone
we wouldn’t stand a chance against her,” Merriman said.

“Her way of giving us an out, unless we’re as pigheaded as Byng, you mean?” Chavez said thoughtfully.

“I doubt she thinks the Commodore’d be pigheaded enough to get all our people killed for nothing, anyway, Sir,” Wayne pointed out. “We’re
Frontier
Fleet, after all. That means we have
working
brains.”