Valor At Vauzlee (39 page)

It was while the Song was out on picket duty that the convoy from Mawcett finally reached Anthius. Although family members had been notified of the deaths of their relatives immediately following the Battle of Vauzlee, and Space Command had released a simulation vid of the battle prepared from the warships' logs, specifics were sketchy and the media was disappointed when informed that a full report wouldn't be released until the analysis of all logs was complete, perhaps in as little as six months. The newsies waiting to greet the convoy got a much bigger story than anything they had expected when assigned to cover the event. Every Peabody gunner had enjoyed a front row seat to the epic battle, so there were suddenly hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Battle at Vauzlee who were willing to talk. The newsies descended upon them like ravenous sharks in a feeding frenzy, eager to record as many accounts as possible. Every Peabody crewman knew that the first ship to arrive had been the Prometheus, and word had quickly circulated after the battle that Lt. Commander Jenetta Carver was the XO on board the Prometheus when the attack began. Almost from the beginning, her name was the only one being bandied about when discussing the battle.

* * *

"Come," Jenetta said, when the computer announced that Lieutenant Ashraf was at the door of her briefing room. The report she'd been reading was exceedingly dull so she was thankful for a brief distraction. She pushed down the cover of the com unit and looked up as her XO entered and settled into the ‘oh-gee' chair in front of her desk. Their relationship had grown a lot less formal in the months they had worked together.

"Isn't it a little early for our daily briefing, Lori?" Jenetta said quizzically.

"Yes, captain, but I thought you'd want to see these right away." She held out two holo-magazine cylinders.

Jenetta accepted them and activated the first by depressing the recessed switch. Immediately, the holographic image of a newspaper's front page leapt upwards from the tube. The full page headline read, ‘Carver Saves Convoy.'

"My God!" Jenetta exclaimed as she saw the heading. She quickly read the story by twisting the end of the tube to scroll down, and then activated the other cylinder. The headline in the second newspaper read, "Carver Protects Artifacts.'

"I can't believe this," Jenetta said after reading the second article. "They make it sound like I was the only one at the engagement. There were almost ten thousand Space Command officers, noncoms, and ratings at that fight. And far too many didn't survive the battle. Why are they giving me so much credit for the victory?"

"Probably because you've been the most visible Space Command officer in this war against the Raiders. You've done more during the past year, by yourself, than all of Space Command was able to accomplish in the decade prior. During the court-martial, your image appeared almost daily on every magazine and newspaper in Alliance space. It appears you've become the poster girl in our war against the Raiders. I imagine that as soon as the newsies learned that you were the First Officer aboard the first SC ship to arrive at Vauzlee, they knew that they had their headline. And from what I've read, the Peabody crews are singing your praises and crediting
you
with their rescue."

"I was just one of thousands at the battle. It's not right."

"They couldn't very well list everyone who fought there; there isn't enough room on the front page. So they took the most visible person for their story."

"You're probably right. That'll teach me to go around destroying Raider warships and their bases," Jenetta said with a sardonic grin.

~ June 17
^th
, 2268 ~

Recalled to the base thirty days following the battle, the five ships that had been performing picket duties joined the eight so far returned in response to the emergency message sent by Gavin to all ships on patrol in the deca-sector. Emergency repairs to four of the ships that had fought the battle, Prometheus, Chiron, Geneva, and Buenos Aires, had been completed, and while they might be in the dockyards for months while repairs necessary to bring them back to full fighting trim were completed, they were at least sufficiently space worthy to travel to the Mars facility under their own power. Three ships, Thor, Bonn, and Calgary, were so badly damaged that they might have to be towed to the Mars facility. Crew loses had been especially heavy on those ships.

All repair efforts had so far been directed at the ships, so the docking ring and station still bore the terrible scars of battle. Huge sections had been sealed off and less than a dozen docking piers in the ring could be utilized. Quartermaster ships, filled with supplies and building materials, were already underway from Earth and half a dozen other planets. Transport ships filled with base construction crews were also on their way. Higgins was too vital to the security of its deca-sector and the economical stability of the Galactic Alliance to have it non-operational for long.

The Song, with a current crew size of more than two-thousand one-hundred, was assigned one of the few available berths on the docking ring. The others were occupied by the ships damaged in the battle. The four arriving destroyers from the battle of Vauzlee, with crew sizes of about seven-hundred, were required to remain in orbit and use their shuttles for station access. Since the shopping concourse was still closed down, easy access to the station by off-duty crewmembers wasn't as important as it normally was.

With the lifting of the ban on travel to Higgins, sporadic passenger and freight traffic already in transit began to appear around the station almost immediately. The destroyed Raider ships, after being searched for personnel trapped in air-tight areas, had been towed to a ‘salvage farm' area guarded by security forces from the station. Over the coming months, Intelligence teams would scour the ships for any information that could provide a clue about Raider base locations, and other planned or completed operations.

Of the seventy-two vessels that had assaulted the base, just sixteen were sufficiently space-worthy to flee when the Glorious was destroyed. The fifty-six ships lost in this fight, combined with the thirty-four lost at Vauzlee, and the fifty-eight lost when Raider-One exploded, meant that the Raider threat in this part of space had been pushed back to levels from which they hopefully might never recover. At the very least, travelers should be safe from pirates for several years to come.

The Song had no sooner completed its docking procedure than Jenetta received an order to report to Admiral Holt's office. The order called for her immediate appearance. She hurried to change her tunic and brush her hair before rushing off the ship.

Owing to the severe damage and the necessary circuitous route required to bypass closed sections of the docking ring and station, the trip to the Headquarters Section of the base took three times longer than normal. And then she was required to sit in the Admiral's outer office for another twenty minutes before the com beeped and the Admiral's aide motioned that she should go in. She tugged on her tunic to straighten it as she stood up, then walked down the short hallway. The double doors to the Admiral's office opened before she reached them. Upon entering the large room, she walked directly to the conference table where Admiral Holt and half a dozen senior officers were seated. She recognized Admiral Margolan - the senior JAG officer on Higgins, Commander Kanes of Intelligence, Captain Gavin, Captain Powers of the Chiron, and four of the five captains whose ships had formed the basic protection force for the base and who had fought in the battle. Without acknowledging the others, she came to rigid attention facing the admiral, a meter from the table.

"Lieutenant Commander Carver, reporting as ordered, sir," she said, staring straight ahead.

The admiral looked at her intently, for a full ten seconds, without saying anything. While facing his withering glare during the incredibly long scrutiny, Jenetta refused to twitch or move a single muscle, except for normal respiration.

"You were ordered to proceed directly to Higgins Space Station by Captain Gavin," he said gravely. "You chose to ignore those orders, did you not?"

"Um, no sir; not exactly."

"What?" the admiral said, before turning to glance at Gavin, whose only response was to return the look, furrow his brow, and shrug his shoulders almost imperceptibly.

"Those were not my precise orders, sir. Captain Gavin ordered me to depart immediately for Higgins at our maximum speed. I appended a copy of that logged message to the report I submitted immediately following the battle here. I held a quick meeting with my senior staff to make preparations for departure, and we left as soon as practicable. The Song was under way within twenty-four minutes of my being awakened and notified of both a Priority-One message and the departure of the Prometheus and Chiron, sir."

"And you interpreted
those
orders to mean that you could then deviate from them at any point you chose?"

"I was ordered to leave immediately for Higgins, and we did. Nothing in my orders specifically precluded a small deviation of four-minutes and fifty-two seconds for good and valid reasons."

"Knowing that the station was under attack by an enemy force of significantly greater strength, and that seconds mattered, you felt that you had a good and valid reason for deviating from course?"

"Yes, sir."

"Explain."

"My senior communications chief discovered an inordinate amount of encrypted com traffic originating from a point some fourteen-billion kilometers from the base while the battle was under way here. I suspected that a command ship or group might be operating from a safe location. I believed that if I could interrupt the flow of command instructions, it would impede their attack by sending the enemy ships here into disarray, making it easier to overcome their remaining forces when we arrived. I ordered my ship to the source of the communications signals expecting to find a command ship and several screening vessels. We were fortunate in that there was only one ship at the location. We dropped our envelope, fired a full spread of torpedoes from our bow tubes, then immediately resumed course for Higgins at our maximum sub-light speed while building our envelope. Sir, I knew that I was stepping slightly outside the spirit of my orders, but that I had already technically adhered to the
letter
of those orders."

"Have you become a
space lawyer
, Commander?" Admiral Holt asked scathingly.

"No, sir. But officers will, at times, be faced with situations that force them to examine closely the letter of their orders, and make a decision as to just how much leeway they have to best accomplish the true mission, as they see it."

Admiral Holt again looked intently at Jenetta for ten seconds without saying anything. He finally broke the silence by saying, "The true mission, as
they
see it?"

"Yes, sir. As I saw it, my mission was to protect this base by destroying as much of the enemy as possible, and ending the attack on Higgins as quickly as possible. I believed that I had information not available to CIC, and that taking time to await approval to divert from course would have exhausted precious seconds, or even minutes, we couldn't spare."

Admiral Holt took a deep breath and released it. "This time you get away with it, Commander. A post-analysis of the battle, using our station sensor logs and information obtained from captured Raider prisoners, corroborates your theory that the Raider action was being directed from that remote location. It's also the only reasonable explanation for the Raiders jamming our DDG net when they arrived. It wasn't to hide the number of ships in their fleet, or the existence of a second force, as we originally thought, but to hide the arrival and continued presence of the command vessel. When the ships attacking Higgins lost contact with their command ship, they must have panicked. Since they knew that we had surprised them with an unknown force at Vauzlee, we believe they might have feared another unknown force was about to descend upon them. In all probability your action saved this station and our protection force from complete destruction. I've decided that you are to be officially commended for your insight, resourcefulness, and courage under fire."

Jenetta smiled slightly as relief coursed through her. "Thank you, sir."

"As you no doubt realize, assembling initial crews for the Prometheus and Chiron greatly taxed the limited personnel resources of this command. With the casualties at Vauzlee, and those here at this latest engagement, we have become seriously short of senior officers in this deca-sector. Therefore, you will not rejoin the Prometheus as Captain Gavin had informed you; at least not yet. You will instead remain in command of the Song until you reach Earth, as originally intended following the Vauzlee action."

"Aye, sir."

"That's all, Commander. Dismissed."

Jenetta braced to attention, turned on her heel, and walked from the room.

As the doors closed behind her, Jenetta stopped to breathe deeply and release it slowly before continuing down the hallway to the outer office.

Inside the office, Admiral Holt drew in a deep breath and expelled it quickly. As he replaced his sham scowl with a wide grin, he said, "Damn, I like that young officer. No criticism of present company is intended, you all know the esteem I hold for you, but I wish that I had a dozen more just like her to form the core of the
next
generation of senior officers that will safeguard this part of space."