Yorktown: Katana Krieger #1 (12 page)

Chapter 8

By 1600, I have everyone off the ship. Had to threaten to have the Marines carry Lt. Powell out, but otherwise, easy. Shelby volunteered to stay, but when Palmer showed up to "chat," I knew her heart wasn't in it, and I sent them off as well. There are 40 to 50 dock workers swarming over every inch of the interior of the ship, resetting systems, removing the garbage, restocking the supplies, cleaning. I made their boss promise not to touch the engines until Emily is back on board in the morning.
On my screen I can see an even bigger crowd outside working on patching the holes, and cleaning off whatever debris is attached to my ship. She'll soon be shiny and new again.
I go to my cabin, the only place I can expect some privacy, and turn on the screen, figuring I should be able to find something on
Yorktown
if I search long enough. I'm getting stupid in my 30s. I hit the button to switch the display to external broadcasts, and the first station on has a live picture of
Yorktown
in it's docking bay, with a slider across the bottom that announces the heroes have returned, and that I am still on board.
It's the network that spans all 47 inhabited star systems, UnionOne. There's no live broadcast across all of them, of course, but every four hours a squadron of drones, loaded with the last four hours of news, sports, weather, and entertainment, jumps into each system and broadcasts (and downloads the news from that system for when it returns to Earth). The picture I am seeing now will be accessible to everyone in every system by midnight.
Then my face replaces
Yorktown
. Bad picture from several years ago, my hair is obviously not regulation, and my eyes have huge brown bags under them. Looks like the mug shot from the time I was arrested on Canada 3, but that's another story. The charges were dropped, after all, and the bartender healed just fine. I turn on the sound, but missed whatever they said about me.
Three seconds of ugly me, then the screen clears, and an obviously computer enhanced video shows up. Big white ship, little tiny black one,
Yorktown
, looking a whole lot smaller than one-third the height and one-third the length. And I hear myself threatening them, then we're blowing them out of the sky. Admiral's right, it looks mighty impressive and gives no hint to how close we came to buying ourselves the proverbial farm.
The announcer then promises an interview with me as soon as possible. Let's hope it's next year.
I spend time flipping to the Earth channels. There are a dozen space stations in Earth orbit, the four Navy facilities, two civilian shipyards, and six commercial depots, places where businesses operate, cargos are exchanged, and deals are made. Means roughly a 100,000 people in orbit here, and another quarter million on the surface of Mars, in orbit around Jupiter, and on the back side of Mercury, some in residence, some passing through.
They need entertainment and there are three Earth only television (yes, we still use that word) stations providing it.
Yorktown
is on all three as I thumb past. It's the identical picture on each, the Navy must have provided access to an internal camera feed. Each station has different commentators sitting out there somewhere, small inset boxes cut into the video with their faces.
I listen for 10 minutes to four different people get the story wrong. Sad. Worst part is them talking over the removal of the body containers from the ship. They should have more respect. My door suddenly wants my attention, ringing.
"Come." Benson's aide is floating there, looking at me.
"Captain, I am under orders not to leave until all 50 of you have left the ship and are on their way to officer's country. You are the last, and I would like to get out of here." He's a captain as well, but staff officer, the belly and the flabby exterior, red cheeks, medium hair tell me he's not been in high gee for a while, and not keeping up on his zero gee exercises.
He looks around my quarters. "There's a constant flow shower in the quarters you've been assigned, they are not even Navy quarters, they are where we put political dignitaries. I am sure you will find them more comfortable than this."
I don't say exactly what I'm thinking, but I can't let that pass. "A captain's ship is always the place they are the most comfortable, but I will let you show me the way, so you can be on yours."
It takes me a couple minutes to pack, then point to the door, he leads and I follow. We get out of the ship through a fixed tunnel this time, a benefit of being in the larger dock, which lets us off next to the transport system for the station. No elevators or other contrivances, the station has long open tunnels with strong air flow that lets one float without expending energy from one end of the station to the other, you just have to be careful to get in the right one to go the direction you want. Takes no time at all for us to reach the 30th floor, and exit into the corridor.
The lights are blinding, then people start yelling my name, a couple seconds to adjust and focus before I know for sure that it's television cameras, and reporters with questions. Benson's aide touches my shoulder to move me along while he addresses the reporters by name and tells them that I will not be answering any questions yet. Yet. Definitely heard him say yet.
"Sorry about that," he tells me, "the only way we'll get rid of them is for you to schedule a time to sit and answer questions. If you'd like, I'll set it up and help you through it."
I think for a minute. "That would be fine. After your boss meets with the crew in the morning?"
"I'll take care of it. Here's your quarters." He hands me the key card. "Pad me if you need anything before then."
I give him a thank you, a hand shake and an I'll see you tomorrow. Then I float into a room unlike anything I've ever seen on a station. Seems to be bigger than an entire deck on a frigate, though I know its not, dark brown colors mostly with hints of just about everything, soft fabric walls and well placed zero gee accouterments. Must be the Navy's way of making its political friends comfy.
I find the shower and discover that I can indeed stand under the hot water for as long as I want. How long since I've been able to do that? A year? Two? Vacation on San Paolo, Brazil system, how long ago was that? Can't even remember.
Get dried off and discover a horizontal sleeping system, silk sheets inside of what is just a very large three person sleeping bag and a restraint system to keep you from floating away, but warm and wonderful against my skin just the same. No time for thinking before sleep takes me.
Don't need an alarm clock, my brain wakes my body at 0600 every morning, regardless of whether I need to be somewhere or not. Take another loonngg shower and float back over to my ship, the hair a floor or so behind me all the way. Between 0800 and 0900 Shelby, Ayala, and I float around my ready room, lamenting our fate and discussing what we want in the way of armaments before we go back out.
We've got four empty missile tubes, and we're going for multiple warhead air to air nukes, plus one mine layer. If we assume that the other three ships out there have the same laser configuration as
Orion
, a multiheaded missile could possibly take them out by overwhelming their defenses. Possibly. Maybe. At minimum, should make McAdams happy.
At 0900, the Admirals reappear, and depress the entire crew. Short message. You are going back out. You are ordered to say nothing except it's an engine test, the cover story is
Constitution
is at the point of engine installation, and we need to make sure what happened to
Yorktown
does not happen to her sister. On leave today, enjoy yourselves, back here at 0800 tomorrow to help with departure preparations.
No question and answer session, they simply float away after the message to my ready room, and I follow, assuming that's what they want. I catch Shelby's eye and drag her along. I can see everyone else starting to float to the exits, body language not happy.
The next two hours we go over the mission, the loss of
Richard
, the destruction of
Orion
. To their credit, neither wants to second guess me, they want to talk strategy variations for when we find the others. We all agree that the first thing next time is to test our missile launchers before we're even in laser range.
When they start asking about my theories of the anomalies we've encountered, I give them every one I have, every one except 0.0001 that is. Finally, they update us on the analysis they are doing, and on the search for our saboteurs, while is 10 seconds long. Nothing yet.
ChiNO and his aide head out after that, while we go over our weapons requests with Admiral Benson, plus talk about whether or not it makes sense to bring more corvettes with us than can dock with
Yorktown
. A mini-battle group of four or five of them might be effective, at least at preventing a confrontation.
Then Benson looks at me. "I understand you have your first interview scheduled."
"First and only," I try to make the burden of my life clear.
He looks at me. "I wish you had put your dress blues on, and maybe cut your hair."
"Honestly, sir," I try for respectful, "I completely forgot about the interview when I got up this morning. I'll see if I can tidy up before we find them."
His aide is working on his pad. "They are on their way up, Captain."
"Then I'll leave you to it," Benson speaks and salutes at the same time. All three of us return it, and watch him float out. His aide stays with us.
In what is obviously meant to be a conspiratorial voice, he leans toward me and says, "I think the media will eat you up in that outfit. Good choice."
I'm thinking about how to answer when the door chimes at me again, and we let the film crew in. It's a female reporter, looks to be about my age, and an older gentleman with a camera.
They ignore us, and huddle together for a few moments, then the cameraman moves to a spot, looks back, and the reporter nods at him. Then she turns to me.
"Can you put something technical looking up on the monitors?"
I answer by reaching out to the console, and touching a couple spots. It puts the nav display on one screen and the hatch screen on the other. Must be good enough, because she floats over to stick a microphone onto my uniform, and then motions me to float over in front of the panels.
"Please relax," she says. "This isn't going out live, you can start over on an answer and we'll just edit out the bad parts. Take your time if you need to think about your answer, we'll edit out the pauses. Okay?"
"You may fire when ready, Gridley."
The light on top of the camera comes to life, close to blinding, making it difficult for me to make out the reporter, and impossible to see Shelby or the cameraman. I'll put up with it if it gives them a better picture of me than the one they are using. Then she starts talking.
"Good morning. We're here with Captain Katana Krieger of the Union frigate
Yorktown
who has kindly agreed to this exclusive interview with the UnionOne Television Network. I'm Miley Langston, and we're lucky enough to be floating in the captain's personal office aboard
Yorktown
herself. Thank you for letting us come aboard, Captain."
"My pleasure, Miley, please call me Katana."
"Thank you, Katana. Let's start with the obvious question. How does it feel to be the most famous captain in the Navy, and to have rescued the crew of the
Packard
?"
"First, I'm part of a team, the crew of
Yorktown
and the entire Union Navy. Anything we did, we did together. And what we did is our job. It's not heroic, or special. It's what all of us do every single day."
"Why don't you take us through the battle." I pause for a second to think it out.
"I was with our Marines investigating the wreckage of CSS
Trump
on the surface of Gamma Omicron 1 and my First Officer was commanding
Yorktown
in orbit. Commander Perez spotted
Orion
coming in, got
Yorktown
into a position where we could see them and they could not see us, and waited. Once
Orion
left orbit for another planet,
Yorktown
picked me up and we maneuvered onto
Orion
's tail without being seen, planning on stalking her until we could circle around in front and take them out."
"The plan was working well, until
Packard
jumped into the system behind us.
Orion
turned to go after the civilians, and we had to chase them down from behind, giving up our advantage of surprise. We got there just in time, and fortunately, our gunners were better than their gunners."
She pauses now for a second.
"You must be very proud of your crew."
"I am, they're the best in the fleet, and I'm proud of the crew of
Congress
that was out there with us. But we can't forget that the crews of
Bainbridge
and
Richard
didn't make it home. Every time I think about our success, I also remind myself of the cost."
"You have a history of making last minute saves, don't you. You saved
Ayacucho
in a battle with pirates, and you saved a Marine company with what I was told was a brilliant maneuver."
"Both of those were teams efforts, many of the Navy officers who made me look smart those days are still with me on
Yorktown
today. I was just the one who gave the order to go."
"The person who took the risk."
"You could say that. Or the person who trusted their team."
"This time you did it with a defective ship."
"Not defective. Crisis doesn't wait for flight testing, unfortunately. We had to go to war before we could test our new engines, and we had some problems. We'll make sure they get fixed, and that the same problems don't happen to our sister ships. I think it proves the soundness of the overall concept that we did what we did with two engines out."
"So your adventure proves that the frigate fleet was a good investment?"
"Absolutely, though in the old days we'd have sent a battleship and it's combat group to Gamma Omicron and it would have been a whole lot shorter and less dramatic. It worries me that we have so few ships these days to cover so many systems."
"We're not at war, we haven't been at war in almost 100 years, we don't need a big Navy, do we?"