18
An Innocent Fighter
Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent
under ’t.
—Shakespeare
Arduan SDH Shem’pter’ai, Expeditionary Fleet of the Anaht’doh Kainat, Agamemnon System
Narrok looked down at the surface of Agamemnon and watched a dust storm emerge from the dark side of the terminator, sweeping across the uninhabitable equatorial desert-belt. A pulse emanated from the selnarm repeater embedded in the observation deck’s main hatchway. “Enter,” sent Narrok.
His new fleet second, Nenset, entered. (Apologies, regret) preceded his lexical pulse of, “Admiral, we have received the answer to your request.”
“And Senior Admiral Torhok has denied my request to postpone the attack date?”
(Regret) preceded “Yes, Admiral. You are instructed to begin the attack upon Penelope at the agreed H hour, M minute.”
Of course I am. “And is there any word on the progress of my offensive enhancement project?”
“Rin station’s yard engineers report all construction is on schedule. They indicate that they have had less problems with the modular interfaces than they expected.”
Well, at least one thing seems to be going right back in the New Ardu system—despite Torhok’s incessant meddling. “Thank you, Nenset. Fleet signal: commence pre-assault operations. Send it at once. You may go.” Nenset seemed grateful to leave. Narrok stared at the surface of Agamemnon again, but three seconds later, the planet’s sere surface seemed to plummet away from him: the fleet was moving.
Moving to undertake an attack that Narrok knew would be disastrous.
Further Rim Fleet and Expeditionary Fleet of the Anaht’doh Kainat, Penelope System
Admiral Erica Krishmahnta looked at the plot and was unable to decide: should she feel despondent or elated?
The reason for despondence was there to read in the holotank’s icons: there were more green icons trailing omega symbols than in any engagement since the very first with the Baldies. And in that mix were two of her precious supermonitors and three of her monitors, to say nothing of the last of the fleet’s cruisers and most of its lighter pickets. Thousands upon thousands of crew were dead, many of whom were officers she had known for years, shared a meal or a drink with. Gone in the space of two hours.
But her eyes slid to the other half of the tank, and she felt the elation rise: the sea of red icons that floated there—dead, motionless—was what she had hoped to achieve. She knew she couldn’t hold Penelope forever. She wouldn’t have enough forts in time. Oh, the components of the forts had been ready, but they took time to move from the yards in Tilghman to their final destinations, even when it was only two transits away, like Penelope.
But she had still had twelve forts at Penelope, dense minefields, lavishly supplied ships, and a different objective: kill so many Baldy ships that she was sure to cripple them into a three-month delay in their offensive operations. Because in three months, the first new ships would be sliding out of the spacedocks in Tilghman, and the minefields in Odysseus would be so dense that even the Baldies couldn’t suicide through them successfully.
So, Krishmahnta was retreating, but she felt the satisfaction of knowing—finally knowing—that this was the last time she had to draw a line in the sand. Today, when she led her battered but still capable fleet through the warp point to Odysseus, she would at last be able to give her peerless crews and cadres a rest. And the Baldies could not break the defenses, because throughout all these months, Admiral Krishmahnta had been buying the time needed to ready what had at last been fully assembled in the Odysseus system: a phalanx of no fewer than forty-four forts, modified so that their missile-resupply systems could be fed from the rear of their superstructures while the launch bays continued to vomit death from their relative bows. Never before had such a defensive edifice been constructed outside the Home Worlds in order to protect a single warp point. And with a solid fleet left to support this defensive network, breaking it would take far more assets than the Baldies had spent thus far throughout their entire campaign. Which meant that, in three months, Admiral Erica Krishmahnta could begin to think about mounting the best and most satisfying defense of all: a strong offense.
Yoshi Watanabe joined her, returning from debriefing the fleet’s senior squadron leaders; he nodded greetings as he looked in the tacplot. “Well, there’s a first for everything.”
“Which, in this case, is what?”
“That everything went according to plan.”
Krishmahnta looked at the plot, worried that she’d missed something. “Yes, they danced to our tune all right. Makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“Can’t they learn? I mean, this is almost exactly what happened to them in Ajax—just worse. Much worse.”
Watanabe frowned at the tacplot. “We paid heavily, too, in our fighter squadrons.”
“Yes, but in a way, it was the fighters that won this battle. With all of our fighters deployed early—to keep theirs from working at our minefields and from getting too close to our forts—the Baldies had to spend and spend and spend to break our line.” Well over two hundred icons denoting dead SDHs attested to the price the invaders had paid. “Anything left for us to do?”
“We’re in good order for transit, if that’s what you mean. Looking at what remains of Baldy’s forces, he doesn’t look ready to mount a new frontal assault, anyway—not unless he can sneak something through the warp point right on the tail of our own transits.”
“You mean like he tried when we were withdrawing from Agamemnon.”
“Yes—and which he might try again.”
“Yoshi, I know that look and that tone: what am I missing on the plot?”
Watanabe shrugged and pointed at a single red icon trailing Krishmahnta’s van, which was strung out like the beads of a green necklace; pacing the human ships, the Baldy was moving briskly toward the Odysseus warp point.
Krishmahnta tried not to snort her disdain. “A single ship? What can they do with that?”
“Maybe nothing. But maybe they could give our defenses in Odysseus trouble by mixing their units in with ours long enough to force the minefields to stand down while what’s left of their fleet’s van follows through.”
“And how is one ship going to do that? The forts in Odysseus would maul it.”
“As we’ve been observing lately, Baldy has been field-modifying a lot of his SDHs for special-purpose duty. Like this one.”
“And this one is modified to do what?”
“Carry pinnaces. Seems like they’ve taken a page from the Bugs’ playbook. They’re looking for a way to inundate a warp point by putting through a stream of the smallest ships possible. And they just might have found it.”
“And given what we’ve seen of the Baldy tactics, the pinnaces could be just big antimatter bombs on a suicide run.”
“Exactly. And if the minefields have been deactivated, and the Baldy pinnaces get in among our forts—”
“Right.” Krishmahnta frowned. “So we have to delay them.”
“Yes—and happily, the unit which detected and ran the sensor sweeps that identified the special design of this SDH also has a plan for delaying, maybe even destroying, it.”
“Is it a sound plan?”
“It’s—well, it is. But it’s also unorthodox. Very unorthodox.”
Krishmahnta rested her forehead in her raised palm. “Not again.”
“Yes, it’s from Wethermere, on the Celmithyr’theaarnouw. We’re getting the details of his plan coordinated with Fleet Tactical now. They’re having to confirm some of the specifics with Engineering.”
Krishmahnta looked at the icons of her fleet. It was limping home, this time: not badly, but with enough of a hitch in its gait that almost any hull she’d send to help the Celmithyr’theaarnouw would be at risk of not making it to the warp point in time, particularly if it took further damage. And, sad as it was to say, the Celmithyr’theaarnouw was of increasingly marginal value: with her squadrons down to forty-five percent, she was a proud, fierce Orion zeget which had lost too many teeth and claws to be fully effective. So if I have to lose something…
She hated even thinking that thought, hated giving the dogged and ever-reliable crew of the Celmithyr’theaarnouw the short end of the stick one more time. And Wethermere—was this his reward for always living to fight another day? To finally be given up to the insatiable maw of war as just so much expendable cannon fodder? It wasn’t fair. But war never was.
Krishmahnta felt Watanabe’s eyes scanning her profile. “Well,” he drawled in an excessively nonchalant tone, “it seems that Least Claw Kiiraathra’ostakjo and his Tactical Officer get to save the day once again. I wonder if Wethermere fully appreciates the honor we’re bestowing upon him.”
Krishmahnta stared down at the green speck that marked the position of the Orion carrier Celmithyr’theaarnouw. “You can ask him yourself. If he lives.”
* * *
Least Claw Kiiraathra’ostakjo rested his muzzle in both handlike paws and didn’t care that his own crew saw him in that position. Because, once again, they were all following one of Wethermere’s schemes, which usually seemed to be the product of a mind either insane or suicidal, or both. But that they were following it at all was Kiiraathra’ostakjo’s fault, and he knew it, because he had done the one thing that he absolutely, positively knew he should not do: he had posed Ossian Wethermere a problem for which there was no conventional solution.
* * *
The conversation had started innocently enough. Thirty minutes earlier, Lubell, another human late of the Bucky Sherman, and an excellent new ops officer, delivered the integrated report on the SDH that they were attempting to delay. It was running its tuners over the red-line, and the surface of its hull was laden with small-craft mooring racks, which were in turn laden with pinnaces. Clearly, this was a Baldy bid to compromise the Fleet’s clean escape through the warp point to Odysseus, and one which might prove successful, for as Lubell had concluded, “We can’t hold this SDH back: it keeps pressing us too hard, and we’re overdue for maintenance. They’re going to steamroller us before we can get through the warp point ourselves. And if they make it to the warp point just behind the fleet, and let loose all those pinnaces—”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo interrupted the human with an expressive nod. “Yes, Lieutenant. I understand. Thank you for your report. Well, it seems we have little choice. We will have to redeploy our fighters en masse if we are to slow them down enough to do our duty to the Fleet. They clearly do not consider our intermittent sorties reason enough to slow their advance.” And from the corner of his slit-pupiled eye, Kiiraathra’ostakjo saw Wethermere turn to stare into the tacplot. And he kept staring there.
That, Kiiraathra’ostakjo reflected, was when he had made his fatal mistake. Almost as a rueful admission that there was nothing else to be done, he had addressed the human. “Lieutenant Wethermere, as our Tactical officer, do you have any alternatives to that option?”
“I might. With respect, Least Claw, the enemy does not fear our current offensive operations enough to make him halt his advance, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then what if we gave him a new reason to slow down?”
“You suggest that we give him a taste of a full-frontal assault with our main hull, as well?”
“No. I suggest that we give the Baldies a gift. A gift that they can’t resist stopping to pick up.”
“A gift? And what sort of gift do you think they might stop for? Perhaps to receive our surrender and take possession of our ship?”
“No—not our whole ship, anyway.”
“Human, when you begin to speak in riddles, I begin to choose the hero-lays I wish chanted over my pyre. What madness are you conceiving now, Wethermere?”
“Last month, in the Agamemnon system, during the fight near Myrtilus—the Baldies clearly wanted one of our fighters.”
“I recall this.”
“Then what if we gave them one?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo paused, making sure he had understood the human correctly. “You would purposely give them an intact model of one of our fighters? You would propose to sacrifice our entire fleet’s advantage in fighter technology?”
Wethermere shook his head. “Firstly, we give them an older fighter with a tuner three marks out of date. That might help them a bit, but not much. Their problem is that they don’t know how to best miniaturize their tuners.” Wethermere looked to Zhou, who nodded in confirmation. “A model three marks out of date is only going to give them marginal improvements. Instead of throwing off five times our rads, and burning out their engines ten times as fast, they might manage to reduce those rates to three times and six times, respectively.”
“Hmm—not so great an advantage to them, but still too great a price for a brief interruption of their advance.”
“I agree. That’s why, if the plan actually works, their technical intelligence services will never get a chance to surgically dissect the fighter at all.”
“Oh, and how do we ensure that?”
Wethermere smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”
* * *
So, mused Kiiraathra’ostakjo, here I sit, without a single fighter left on board, my squadrons and even my hull in dangerous proximity to a massively armed and armored heavy superdreadnought, a body missing from the lockers of the burial detail, and everyone’s life depending on the outcome of an utterly insane scheme.
The fighter squadrons’ main command channel crackled. “Celmithyr’theaarnouw, this is Polo Two, over.”
The Orion equivalent of the commander, strike group, a particularly taciturn male named Threk’feakhraos, replied, “Receiving. Status?”
“Polo One is KIA, but we still have control over Medicine Ball. We have handed it off to Polo Three, with backup remote control transferred to Polo Six. Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear flights are still on my flanks.”
“Has the enemy begun using flechette missiles?”
“Nothing but, for the last twenty seconds.”
“Standby for orders and activation of Medicine Ball, Polo Two.” Threk’feakhraos looked to Wethermere. “Tactical?”
Wethermere glanced at Kiiraathra’ostakjo, who nodded.
Wethermere grinned and said loudly enough for Threk’feakhraos’s pickup to register it, “Toss out the Ball, Polo Two.”
* * *
“You heard the man, Polo Three. Time to put the Ball in play.”
Polo Three—otherwise known as Vera Demetrikos—responded crisply to Polo’s brand-new flight leader, Jakub Varshov. “Throwing in the Ball now, Polo Two. Don’t you guys be too far behind me.”
“I’m right on your tail, Polo Three.”
True to form, Jake, thought Vera, who could hear the subtle leer in her flight leader’s voice. Vera steered her fighter off to the relative left and down with two jerky twitches of the controls, as if a malfunction—or panic—had compelled her to fall out of formation. Her apparent wingman—Medicine Ball—followed her faithfully; Polo flight was a bit farther back, being protectively screened by the still more distant Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear flights.
The Baldies pounced, reacting to the break in their enemy’s formation by firing a torrent of flechette missiles. Moments later, large swathes of space became impassable due to the expanding clouds of those lethal, mite-sized darts.
Spaceside flechette munitions were, fundamentally, misnamed: their resemblance to the lethal in-atmosphere flechette munitions was purely superficial. In space, and among craft using reactionless drives at relativistic pseudospeeds, a flechette missile’s method of operation recalled ancient caltrops more than it did a modern shotgun. The warhead of the flechette missile detonated a fraction of a second before its drive burned out: in that fraction of a second, the warhead sent a sleetstorm of hard, grain-sized projectiles out in every direction. While within the missile’s drive-field—which bubbled out in a final overpowered and self-annihilating pulse—the projectiles kept their relativistic velocity. But when the missile was destroyed, and the drive field with it, the flechettes fell back into normal space-time. The result: a sphere of mite-sized tetrahedrons, which, if hit by a fighter at pseudorelativistic speeds, was sure to destroy or at least disable the small craft.
Within seconds, the volume of space around Vera was filled with just such globes of flechettes. Some were peppering the area around Medicine Ball as well. Perfect. She called up Medicine Ball’s remote-control system on her dynamically reconfigurable board and tapped the virtual button labeled “RPV match-course autopilot: OFF.” The green button lost its color, became gray. Then she hit the button beneath it, labeled “Demo Command Circuit,” and whispered, “Godspeed, Sven.”
* * *
From a distance of 32,162 kilometers away, Polo Twelve—redesignated Medicine Ball for its last flight—swerved erratically, its pilot’s hands still on its suddenly undirected controls. A second later, the fighter quaked—first from a blast back near its fuel tanks and main bus, and then again when a small, externally mounted explosive charge blasted in the exposed glassteel portside cockpit panel. The hard vacuum pulled the air out in a single cyclonic blast, sucked out papers, tugged at the pilot’s hands, attacked the flesh of his face—which had been exposed by the shattered faceplate of his flight helmet. But the form of the pilot remained motionless—even as Medicine Ball tumbled out of folded space, suddenly motionless since its drive field was gone.
Already many light-seconds away, Vera Demetrikos brusquely wiped a tear off her cheek; Sven Pugliotti had been a nice guy, a quiet guy, a brave guy—and she hated leaving one of her own behind. But, safely bracketed by the survivors of Polo flight, and further protected by Rugby and Ak’kraastaakear squadrons, she followed the last orders of the mission:
Return to the barn.
* * *
On the bridge of the Celmithyr’theaarnouw, the CSG growled through the tally of his squadrons’ losses. “We lost eleven fighters.” He cut his eyes quickly at a blinking silver-white icon in the tacplot. “Not counting Medicine Ball, of course.”
Lubell leaned forward over the ops board to peer into the holotank. “The question is, have the Baldies seen it?”
As if to answer him, the red gnats in the tacplot—the Baldy fighters—quickly split into two separate groups: one swarmed around the bright white icon that marked the position of Medicine Ball; the rest formed a wall between that position and the Celmithyr’theaarnouw’s retreating squadrons.
Lubell leaned back, still watching. “Well, son of a bitch.”
“Sensors,” commanded Kiiraathra’ostakjo, “report.”
“Half of the enemy fighters surrounding Medicine Ball have shut down their reactionless drives. The SDH has altered course toward those same coordinates. Now she is slowing, slowing…and she has shut down her drives as well.”
“Helm, best speed to rejoin the rearguard of the Fleet’s van. Execute immediately.” Kiiraathra’ostakjo leaned back with a look at Wethermere. “As you humans say, ‘so far, so good.’ ”
Wethermere, still focused on the data readouts, simply nodded and told Zhou, “Start the clock.”
Zhou hit the timer, glanced at the clock, and read what it showed. “Ten minutes. And counting.”
* * *
In the space surrounding the motionless Medicine Ball, Baldy fighters adopted postures that were both aggressive and protective. Sensor-equipped shuttles approached, measured, scanned, scanned, scanned again: no sign of power emanations. No sign of computer activity. No sign of mechanical movement of any kind. And no signs of life.
When Zhou’s operations clock on the bridge of the Celmithyr’theaarnouw showed eight minutes, two heavily modified Arduan shuttles came forward and reached out with robotic arms and tentacles that secured the human fighter in their steely clasps. Using standard fusion-impulse rockets, they began towing the crippled remains of Medicine Ball toward their looming mothership: the Arduan heavy superdreadnought, its back, belly, and sides bristling with scores of pinnaces. A brightly lit vehicle bay opened in the warship’s immense side: altering course slightly, the two shuttles dragged their precious cargo unceremoniously in that direction.
When Zhou’s clock hit seven minutes, and just before Medicine Ball was drawn inside the SDH, the Celmithyr’theaarnouw focused one last, wide-spectrum, high-gain active scan upon its opponent, with particularly strong pulses in the radio and microwave frequencies. Indeed, those pulses were not only strong, but unusually repetitive.
At six minutes, the bay doors began to close and the SDH’s reactionless drive reinitiated. She had lost ground in her pursuit of the Orion carrier, and would still have to lose a bit more, since going straight from cold drives and full stop to hot drives and full speed would severely damage, and possibly destroy, her engines’ tuners and coils. However, as the superdreadnought picked up speed, her outreaching sensors detected small new signatures: the Celmithyr’theaarnouw was depositing mines, a few at a time, as she gave ground before the stern-chasing leviathan.
At five minutes, the SDH’s reactionless drives had folded space enough so that the Arduans were no longer falling behind the Orion carrier. They swept the first cluster of mines out of their way with defensive lasers and pressed on, bold and direct.
Four minutes. In the vehicle bay of the SDH, an all-clear buzzer—both audial and selnarmic—pulsed to announce that the vast cavern had been repressurized and that the final set of chemical, thermal, and radiation scans indicated that the human wreck was truly inert. However, as the commander of the technical-intelligence cluster waited for the doors to open so he could inspect his prize, he noted that the “Emergency purge” override control remained illuminated. The hangar’s senior manip, who stood ready at the controls, pulsed (regrets) but, “At the first sign of trouble, I must purge the whole bay.”
“I understand.”
Three minutes.
The last of the carrier’s mines out of its way, and its engines now warmed to be able to attain maximum speed, the Arduan SDH pushed its tuners to the limit. The carrier continued to speed away but was now slowly losing ground.
Meanwhile, the access hatchways into the heavy superdreadnought’s bay opened at last. The entirety of the ship’s technical-intelligence cluster swarmed out, leaping around and past the withdrawing sensor bots and converging on the human fighter.
Eager and sinuous, the Arduans surrounded the vehicle, sweeping it with more reliable, individual sensors. Still no sign of any threat. But it was not the prize that the cluster-commander had been hoping for: in addition to the damage done to the vehicle, it was also a very old model of fighter—the oldest still used by human formations. But its tuner and entire engine were still far beyond what the Children of Illudor had at their disposal for small craft.
Two minutes.
The human-biology junior group leader sent a pulse to the cluster-commander, signifying that he had something (interesting) to report.
“What have you noted?”
“The pilot is—was—a human male. The effects of the explosive decompression seem to have been very severe. The flesh is more desiccated than I would have expected.”
“Did the cockpit lose all air?”
“Yes, and his suit was breached in multiple locations, including the faceplate.”
“Well, does it present any danger to us? Is the body some kind of ruse? Are they trying to infest us with a geneered virus?”
“I seriously doubt it, Commander. If anything, the extreme desiccation makes it unlikely that any biot would have survived to be capable of infecting us—that is, if we were so stupid as to bring the human’s remains out of the hangar.”
“Very well, then. Remove the remains to the sealed med module for analysis, once its jettisoning charges have been primed. Are any identifiers attached to the body?”
“Yes, Commander, it has a name patch. Sven Pugliotti.”
“Record it, and put the remains in storage.”
“Yes, Commander.”
One minute.
The engineering prime who entered the bay with the disassembly team was new to the operation; she was a last minute replacement from Fleet, arriving earlier that day. She quickly found and inspected the high-gain fuel cells that were used to start the reactionless engine system. She looked up at the cluster-commander. “Excellent news. The engine and its starter are completely intact. Should I begin to remove them?”
“Do not touch the engine components! That is for sequenced technical analysis, one piece at a time, in the lab clean-rooms. Just uncouple the power leads and make sure all the controls are inert.”
Thirty seconds.
The engineering prime, unseen beneath the savaged belly of the human fighter, signaled, “Group Leader, this craft’s systems are damaged—and unfamiliar. It is a very old model, and it has been extensively modified.”
“Yes? And the significance of these facts?”
“It is hard to tell exactly what needs to be removed, Group Leader. In the places where it is most severely damaged, I cannot always tell if those systems were original or modified prior to being hit.”
“Well, let us be maximally cautious. Start by removing anything with live or residual electric potential. Other than the power core itself—that is part of the engine.”
The engineering prime sounded cautious. “Could the power core be weaponized?”
“Impossible. Their reactionless drive is fundamentally the same as ours, so the power core only retains a starter charge for the drive. It cannot discharge as anything other than a brief gigawatt pulse. Just disconnect it from the fuel cells and the master controls, to be safe.”
“Yes, Cluster-Commander.”
Fifteen seconds.
“The electrical systems have been neutralized, Cluster-Leader.”
“Excellent. I will signal the ship prime that the human fighter has been secured.”
Zero seconds.
Buried deep inside a lightly pressurized, modified coolant sleeve, two objects—both of which were needed to resist the expansion of a coiled trigger-spring—finally completed the changes that had begun when they received the activating microwave and radio pulses from the Celmithyr’theaarnouw seven minutes earlier.
One object was a bio-decay capsule, usually designed for the precision-timed release of targeted drugs. Its synthetic bio-gel suspension reached the end of its activated life cycle and swiftly deliquesced. The capsule collapsed.
The second object—a timed mechanical-resistance actuator—gave way at the same instant. A restraining tab—stressed to breaking by the constant pressure of the coiled spring beneath it—finally tripped: the tab’s precisely calculated nanomatrix resistance was designed to fracture when the accumulated force exerted upon it exceeded its miniscule lifetime load rating.
Released when the two objects collapsed, the trigger-spring shot forward, slamming a primed actuator rod into the butt plate of a piezo-electric cell.
The cell’s discharge both activated the power core’s test probe—which swung immediately back into contact with the drive’s direct power feed—and also sent a conducting arc through the now-linked systems.
Suddenly hot-wired into connection with the drive coils, the power core discharged.
The twenty-nine gigawatt ignition pulse hit the tuner coils, activating the engine for under 0.5 seconds before the sustained heat vaporized the test probe and the power level in the core was exhausted.
But only 0.02 seconds into that discharge, and therefore, 0.48 seconds before the power ran out, the crippled fighter’s reactionless drive kicked briefly into life.
At that moment, Medicine Ball’s entire fifty-one-ton mass was instantaneously accelerated to 0.12 c, cocooned within its engine’s momentary drive field.
However, the Arduan heavy superdreadnought’s own drive field refused to share folded space with this unexpected internal interloper. Contrapolarized gravitic forces, normally used to bend space selectively, tore each other asunder—a split second after Medicine Ball proved just how much energy is released when fifty-one tons of fighter impacts the interior of an Arduan warship’s armored hull at a speed of 20,500 kilometers per second.
* * *
Sixty-three seconds later, on the bridge of the Celmithyr’theaarnouw, a small star flared briefly into existence at the center of the stern-looking viewscreen. Kiiraathra’ostakjo looked down at Lubell, who smiled his huge, toothy smile—and earned a warning growl in return. Orions only showed their teeth when they meant business—bloody business—and the one courtesy they invariably expected from humans was to remember, and follow, that custom. Lubell closed his mouth so tightly and so quickly that he seemed to have swallowed his teeth.
“You may report now, Ops,” muttered Kiiraathra’ostakjo.
“Target destroyed, Least Claw.”
“This I surmised. But thank you.” He turned to Wethermere. “Congratulations, Mr. Wethermere. In truth, it will be a pity to see you go.” Kiiraathra’ostakjo had the gratification—finally—of saying something which surprised Wethermere, rather than vice versa.
“I’m going? Where?”
Kiiraathra’ostakjo looked at the ship’s chronometer. “I suspect you shall find out in about two hours. Until then, you will join me in my quarters for what I expect to be a mutually unpleasant experience.”
“Which is?”
“Teaching you how to improve your pronunciation of the Tongue of Tongues. Consider it my parting gift to you.”
* * *
Two hours and fourteen minutes later, Ossian Wethermere was standing at attention before Admiral Krishmahnta in her ready room. She had a new memo in her hand, and waved it at him. “And here’s another ‘anonymous’ and harebrained plan—this one about energy-torpedo battery reconfiguration for capital ships. It’s yours, isn’t it?”
“Uh…yes, sir. How could you tell?”
“How could I not? This kind of inspired insanity doesn’t cross my desk every day—and certainly not as an anonymous memo. Which is why I’ve got to get you the blazes out of my fleet.”
“Sir?”
“You’re to report to the courier Darcy Maisson as soon as you leave this ward room and make straight for your new assignment.”
“Yes, sir.” Wethermere tried not to look too relieved, but—for a few seconds—Krishmahnta’s tone had made it sound as though his next duty station was going to be in a small, secure room in the Gallipoli’s brig. “You did say I have a new assignment, sir?”
“A very new assignment, Commander. Yes, you can get your jaw up off the deck whenever it suits you, Mr. Wethermere. For now, your promotion to lieutenant commander is merely a brevet rank—but if you’re successful on your next assignment, I just might be able to make it stick for good.”
“Yes, sir. And, again—what’s my new assignment?”
“Why, to get these new energy-torpedo batteries installed in the new hulls we’re laying down back in Tilghman.”
“Sir, with all due respect, I’m no engineer. I’m just a—”
“You’re a person who makes things happen, who gets things done, Commander. I’ve got hundreds of engineers, but not a lot of—well, whatever the hell kind of specialist you are. And you have got to—got to—make this armament upgrade happen.”
“But, sir—”
“Commander, as I dismiss you, I will give you two choices. You either turn yourself around, head to Tilghman, and get to work—or, if I hear another peep out of you, I will have you taken off this ship in irons. And you’ll stay in those irons until you get to Tilghman.”
Wethermere snapped a salute, about-faced, and exited.
At best speed.