Shadow of Victory - eARC (47 page)

“No, Ma’am,” Yamaguchi agreed. “The Lieutenant is good. Probably because of all those years he spent as a merchant spacer.” The yeoman smiled suddenly. It wasn’t often that Ginger saw one of his smiles, but when they came, they illuminated his entire face. “If you’d like me too, Ma’am,” he suggested, “I imagine I could come up with some…creative requests that would make the Lieutenant work for it for a change. Especially if I got Jared involved.” The smile turned positively wicked. “We haven’t requested anything at all esoteric for your cabin stores, you know. There’s got to be an opportunity there!”

“You, Gareth Yamaguchi, are a wicked man,” she told him with a chuckle. “However, I will admit that a certain ignoble part of me is highly in favor of the idea. Why don’t you and Jared put your heads together and come up with a potential ‘challenge list’ for me to look over?”

“Of course, Ma’am.” Yamaguchi’s smile faded, but the gleam stayed in his eye, and Ginger treasured it.

“In that case, I think we’re about done, and—”

“Excuse me, Captain,” Pallavicini interrupted respectfully, poking his head in through the day cabin door.

“Yes, Jared?”

“You have a com request, Ma’am. It’s Ms. Terekhov.”

“Ask her to hold five seconds while Gareth and I finish up, then put her through,” Ginger said with a smile.

“Yes, Ma’am.”

The steward’s head disappeared, and Ginger looked back at Yamaguchi.

“As I was saying, I think we’re about done. Please do make sure to get those notes typed up for me before the department head meeting, though.”

“Of course, Captain.”

Yamaguchi closed his memo board, gathered up his minicomp, and headed for his own cubbyhole of an office. Ginger watched him go, then punched the key which had begun flashing on her desk com.

“Good afternoon, Ginger,” Sinead Terekhov said from the display.

“Good afternoon, Sinead.”

It no longer felt quite so strange to address Aivars Terekhov’s wife by her first name. In fact, it was easy. Like her husband, Sinead had an innate ability to put people at ease, and in her case, the constraints of rank—and of the relationship between a junior officer and her superior—didn’t come into play. Although, when Ginger thought about it, the difference between their family backgrounds would probably have been a problem for some of Sinead’s social peers. The O’Daleys and the Longs had been around a long, long time, and Ginger really had very little idea how wealthy Sinead was…except that the proper adverb had to be “very.” Her own family, on the other hand, was solidly middle-class, and Ginger had begun her naval career as enlisted. She imagined there were quite a few people from Sinead’s background who would have been just a bit less genuinely warm to someone from hers.

In fact, I damned well know there are! I’ve met some of the bastards.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, and Sinead wrinkled her nose at her.

“Actually, I wanted to see if you’d be free to join me for dinner this evening, or possibly tomorrow night?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t make it today. I’m having a working dinner with my senior officers. Tomorrow night would probably work.” Ginger thought, rubbing the tip of her nose with her left index finger. “Commander Lawson, Lieutenant Primikynos, and I have a meeting tomorrow with a rep from Logistics Command, but I should be clear of that no later than fifteen hundred. Call it sixteen hundred, to be on the safe side. That could put me in Landing by seventeen-thirty.”

“That would be more than early enough. Can I go ahead and pencil you in? It’s not anything formal. And in light of what you’ve said about Steward Pallavicini, I’ll promise to serve something light!”

“God!” Ginger laughed. “Thank you for that! I know he absolutely means well, but I’m going to get Doctor Massarelli to beat him about the headed ears.”

“You see? You are developing good tactical instincts!” Sinead smiled. “Screen when you leave the ship, and I’ll have the limo pick you up at the port.”

* * *

“So, overall, I’m completely satisfied with our people’s performance,” Ginger said from the head of the table.

Pallavicini and the stewards mates he’d enlisted for the evening had cleared away dinner. Now her senior officers sat back in their chairs, coffee cups and dessert dishes in front of them, and looked back up its length at her.

Fred Hairston sat at the table’s foot, flanked by Kumanosuke Lawson, Charles Ward’s engineering officer, and Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov. Raymundo Atkins sat to Lawson’s left, and Lieutenant Yolande Cornelisz, the ship’s electronic warfare officer, faced Nakhimov across the table. Lieutenant Traxton Sughavanam, Ginger’s communications officer, sat to Cornelisz’ right, facing Lieutenant Oliver Primikynos, and Lieutenant Benjamin Marsden, CO of HMLAC
Nożownik
and the senior member of Charles Ward’s LAC squadron, sat to Primikynos’ right, while Surgeon Lieutenant Sying-ni Massarelli sat directly to Ginger’s left.

“I know it’s been hard on all of them,” she continued now, cradling her own cup in both hands. “All of us—aside from Sying-ni and Dimitri—are new to them, and to be honest, I can’t really imagine, even now, what it must be like for a ship’s company to lose that many of its senior officers in a heartbeat.” She shook her head sadly. “In that respect, we’re all really looking in from the outside.”

“That’s true in one sense, Ma’am,” Massarelli said.

The surgeon lieutenant was, by any measure, the most visually striking person Ginger Lewis had ever seen. Her hair’s natural color was a vivid emerald green. Her eyes were a shade of amber Ginger had only seen once, in a German Shepherd, and their pupils were vertical slits, not round. Her fingernails were much stronger and narrower than those of any other human Ginger had ever met, and her ears were elongated and almost triangular in section, their tips pricking through that improbably green hair. When she moved, it was with an extraordinarily graceful, curiously sinuous carriage which only underscored her feline appearance.

Thanks to her personnel file, Ginger knew the source of the obviously massive engineering in Massarelli’s genetic heritage. Like Paulo d’Arezzo, it had been provided courtesy of Manpower, Incorporated, although at least in Paulo's case no non-human DNA had gone into the mix. Sying-ni Massarelli was the granddaughter of yet another liberated genetic slave who’d chosen to settle in the Star Kingdom of Manticore and take the surname of the captain whose cruiser had liberated him from a Mesan slave ship.

Ginger wondered if there’d been any temptation on her grandfather’s part to attempt to have his own gengineered appearance muted or even completely smoothed away in his children. She was quite certain Doctor Massarelli would have felt no inclination in that direction, however. She wore that green hair, those cat eyes, those pointed ears, as a conscious badge of pride, a proclamation of her refusal to hide her slave heritage…and her own personal declaration of war.

Interesting contrast there, between her and Paulo. Or at least between her and the old Paulo, Ginger thought. I wonder if they’ve discussed it?

“True in what sense, Sying-ni?” she asked out loud.

“In the sense that you’re all relative newcomers, and that our people took a really heavy psychological hit. But every man and woman in the Navy—for that matter, in the entire star system—has taken a hard hit. You and the XO and everyone else sitting around this table are no different in that respect.” Those amber, cat-like eyes circled the other faces. “I know we’re all concentrating on pulling the rest of the crew up out of the depression, the posttraumatic shock of what happened, and to be honest, I think most of us are doing a pretty fair job of that. But it would be a mistake—a serious mistake—for us to underestimate or, even worse, deny the extent to which this has affected us.”

“Do you really think we’re doing that, Doctor?” Commander Lawson asked, and his voice was a little tight, a little hard around the edges.

Massarelli looked at him calmly for a moment, then nodded.

“Yes, Sir. I do.”

Lawson’s naturally dark complexion got a shade darker and his jaw tensed. For a moment, he seemed to hover on the brink of saying something sharp, but then his nostrils flared and he shoved himself back in his chair without speaking.

Ginger watched him with understanding and an edge of concern. As Charles Ward’s engineering officer, Lawson would be absolutely critical to the ship’s success, and she was worried about him. Like Nakhimov and Hairston, Lawson was a Sphinxian. But while Hairston had lost a cousin and her three children in Yawata Crossing, virtually Lawson’s entire family had lived in or around the small city of Tanners Port…which had been obliterated by the debris-spawned tsunamis.

It was abundantly clear that Hairston had taken the attack very personally, but the XO had focused that anger outwardly. He was looking for necks to break, and he spent a lot of time with Raymundo Atkins and his tactical section. Lawson seemed to be focusing his rage, his fury, internally, however, and that could be a very bad thing. Especially since he was four years older than Ginger and clearly felt his own engineering experience—he’d been a Hephaestus yard dog for three years and commanded a major shipbuilding module for his last year there—made him more qualified than her for the captain’s chair aboard a ship like Charles Ward.

Ginger was prepared to deal with that…resentment on his part if she had to, and as long as he kept it under control, she didn’t blame him for feeling it. She didn’t agree with him, but she didn’t blame him, either, and she understood it wasn’t necessarily something he’d chosen to feel. But if that internal anger of his locked up with a feeling of grievance, of having been passed over for something that was his just due…

Don’t borrow trouble, she told herself. So far, he’s done his job, and there hasn’t been a hint of his letting anything get in the way of that. I know why Sying-ni’s worried about him, though. I could see him eating a pulser dart one night. But until it looks like it may actually be reaching that point, I don’t have any basis—or any valid reason, for that matter—to think about requesting his relief. And if I did try to have him replaced, and if BuPers could actually come up with someone as a replacement, it’d probably finish him off once and for all. The man’s hanging onto his duty because right this minute, it’s all he has left.

“I think that’s a very valid point for all of us to bear in mind, Sying-ni,” she said after a moment, meeting the surgeon lieutenant’s eyes but watching Lawson from the corner of her vision. “I know I haven’t really dealt with my ‘survivor’s guilt’ yet.” She smiled with very little humor. “I imagine it’ll be a while before I can draw a deep enough breath for that, and I won’t pretend I’m not grateful it will. But you’re right. We do need to bear it in mind.”

She glanced away from Massarelli, letting her eyes circled the table. Lawson’s face might have clenched a little tighter, but he looked back levelly enough when it was his turn to meet her gaze, and she nodded in satisfaction. Then she took a sip of coffee, set the cup down her, and squared her shoulders.

“However,” she said more briskly, “that’s probably enough reflecting on gloom and doom for the evening. In fact, I think we’ve covered everything that needed covering as a group…and I understand from my spies that we have several fair to middling spades players in our senior command crew.”

Several people chuckled, and Commander Hairston’s hazel eyes gleamed. Calling the XO a hard-core spades player was rather like calling the Tannerman Ocean damp, and Oliver Primikynos wasn’t far behind.

“I have a few other points I’d like to discuss with some of you,” she continued, “but I don’t see any reason to do it in a stuffy, formal setting. So if Jared—” she looked over Hairston’s head to where Pallavicini had poked his head back out of his pantry “—would be good enough to find the cards, I think we’ve earned a little bit of relaxation.”

Chapter Forty-Two

“I have to say, Mister President, that I was a little surprised by the menu,” Michelle Henke said.

“Really?” President Warren Suttles looked back at her with a smile. The President was on the short side of medium height—for a Montanan, anyway—with dark hair going white at the temples. He was a small-framed man, with well-manicured hands, and Henke couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked more like a professor at a small college somewhere than the president of an entire star system. “I hope it was a pleasant surprise?” he continued.

“Oh, it was delicious!” she assured him. “It was just that given the way the beef you produce here is Montana’s hallmark, I’d rather assumed it was also a staple of any state dinner.”

“Figured that might be the case.” Suttles smile turned into something much closer to a grin. “It’s a good idea to cut against the grain, every so often, though. And sage hen’s something else we do pretty well on Montana. ’Course I understand it’s not quite the same as the original sage hen.”

“Not hardly,” a considerably taller, fair-haired man standing with them in the Musselshell Ballroom, the biggest one in the Beaverhead Hotel, the tallest luxury hotel in Estelle, the capital of the Montana System. “Spent three of the worst years of my life on Old Terra,” Chester Lopez, the Montanan Attorney General continued. “Didn’t want to go, but Dad insisted DeVry was the only place to get a real law degree.” He snorted harshly and waved the whiskey tumbler in his hand in a disgusted arc. “Never really understood that, since they don’t pay any damned attention to their own laws. Anyway, I tried the ‘original’ sage hen while I was there, and I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite as disappointed in something in my life.”

He shook his head gravely, but amusement gleamed in his dark eyes.

“That bad, was it, Chester?” Suttles asked with the air of a man obediently offering an opening.

“Wasn’t rightly bad,” Lopez replied in the tone of a man trying to be fair. “Sure was on the scrawny side, though. I told the cook I’d expected a grown-up bird, and he told me that was what it was. Seems like the ‘original’ variety never gets to more ’n about three kilos.”

“Three?”

“That’s right, Mister President,” Lopez assured him, and returned his gaze to Henke. “Now, the Montana sage hen’s not considered even moderately well grown till it hits nine, maybe ten kilos, Countess Gold Peak. And the one we had to table tonight was probably closer to twelve.”

“Well, it was certainly delicious,” Henke said with a chuckle. She’d discovered on her first, brief visit to Montana that nothing on Montana wasn’t bigger—and, of course, better—than anything any other planet might boast. And, to be fair, looking at something like the Sapphire Mountains’ New Missouri Gorge tended to substantiate a lot of that. “I’m not at all disappointed in missing the beef—especially since I’m sure I’ll see plenty of it while we’re here.”

“Can’t say we’re sorry to see you here, either, Admiral,” another voice said.

Henke turned to find face Commodore Francine Cody of the Montana Customs Patrol. The MCP, which was in the process of being folded into the Talbott Quadrant Customs Patrol, was the closest thing to a navy Montana had possessed before the system’s annexation into the Star Empire. It had never amounted to more than a handful of light, sublight patrol craft, but within those limits it had been a professional and well trained force, and Cody was its senior officer. She was also a very tall, rangy woman, almost as tall as Henke’s best friend, Honor Harrington. She had a much deeper voice than Honor’s, however, and her brown eyes were dark.

“Especially not after what happened at Spindle…and Manticore,” Cody continued, and those dark eyes held Henke’s levelly. Suttles looked a little uncomfortable and seemed about to say something. But then he stopped with a small headshake. Lopez, on the other hand, only smiled.

“Don’t want to sound alarmist or try to push you into a corner,” the commodore went on, “but I’m just a mite nervous over what’s likely to happen if you were to pull out. Being as we’re sort of…exposed here in Montana.”

“I fully realize that, Commodore,” Henke replied. “Actually, of course, Tillerman is a bit more exposed to anything coming out of the Madras Sector than Montana,” she pointed out, “but we’re fully aware of the threat to Montana. In fact, that’s why I’m here instead of with the Tillerman detachment.” She sipped champagne, then shrugged slightly. “I think we can take it as a given that what happened to Crandal’s pretty much defanged anything from Madras, so I don’t really anticipate a serious threat out of Meyers any time soon. And you’re right; from the perspective of an attack direct from the League—or from any…independent star systems, let’s say—Montana’s the more exposed. As for how long we’ll be here, that’s not really a question I can answer, because so much depends on future events. I can say we have no intention of pulling out of Montana unless there’s a direct, credible, and more serious threat to another system in the Quadrant…or unless the strategic situation changes in a way which requires offense of action.”

“Offensive action against the League, My Lady?” Suttles was clearly nervous about that thought, Henke noted.

“Well, Mister President,” she said dryly, “no one in the Star Empire’s contemplating a counteroffensive against the Kingdom of Oz.”

The storybook reference went right past him—not surprisingly; Henke only knew about it because of her friend Honor’s interesting reading tastes—but he obviously understood her context just fine. And he didn’t seem particularly pleased by it, she noted, and castigated herself for excessive levity.

Again.

“What I mean, Mister President,” she said in a more serious tone, “is that we’ve already been attacked by the Solarian League, and at this time we can’t know what they’re going to do next. If there’s an ounce of sanity in Old Chicago, they’ll denounce Crandall’s actions and apologize for them. Unfortunately, there’s been very little evidence of sanity anywhere in the Sol System for quite some time So it’s entirely possible that we are, indeed, going to find ourselves in a shooting war with the Solarian League.”

Suttles’ eyes had grown wider at her frankness, but she continued levelly.

“The Empress has already instructed us to activate a long-standing contingency plan. We call it Operation Lacoön, and under that ops plan, the Navy is currently in the process of securing control of every wormhole we can reach and closing them to all Solarian-registry shipping.” She saw Cody wince in understanding of what that meant, but went on for Suttles’ benefit. “Once those wormholes are closed, the Solarian interstellar economy’s going to effectively come to a standstill. Some shipping will still get through, but it’ll all have to be re-routed and our best estimate is that even after they re-route, which will take them T-months, if not years—they’ll be operating at maybe fourteen or fifteen percent of their pre-Lacoön levels. To get back up to, say, fifty percent, they’ll have to at least quadruple their merchant tonnage, and that’s not going to happen tomorrow, either. And if those worm holes stay closed to them, they’ll never get much above sixty percent of where they were before we shut them down.”

She paused and gave the system president a cold, hard smile.

“I don’t care how big their economy is, that’s going to hurt them, Mister President—hurt a lot. The idea is to cause sufficient pain to encourage Undersecretary Kolokoltsov to…rethink the sort of belligerence Josef Byng and Sandra Crandall have displayed. It’s a bit drastic, but to paraphrase an ancient pre-diaspora politician a friend of mine turned up a while ago, ‘The Solarian League is like a hog. You have to kick it in the snout to get its attention.’”

Lopez snorted and even Cody’s lips twitched, but Suttles shook his head.

“Kicking something the size of the Solarian League in the snout strikes me as a…risky undertaking, Lady Gold Peak,” he said.

“Of course it is. Unfortunately, given what’s already happened at Spindle, there’s nothing we can do that isn’t risky, one way or another. It’s the Empress’ opinion—” she emphasized the title ever so slightly and saw the awareness that she was speaking of her own first cousin flicker in his eyes “—that audacity and firmness are our best recourse. I’m sure Mister Van Dort will be discussing the Crown’s intentions with you in greater detail as you meet with him over the next week or so, but essentially, our position’s very simple. We won’t seek additional military confrontations with the League, but we will be firm in the face of additional Solly provocations. And if they seek additional military confrontations, we’ll give them to them.” She showed her teeth briefly. “I believe New Tuscany and Spindle have demonstrated that, for the foreseeable future, our war-fighting technology’s hugely superior to anything the League has. If it comes to more open combat, the Solarian Navy won’t enjoy the experience one bit. And if it does come to additional open combat, if the idiots in Old Chicago who’re allowing themselves to be manipulated escalate the conflict between the League and the Star Empire, then, yes, we’ll adopt the most offensive operational stance we can. Any war we fight against the League has to be as short and decisive as we can make it, because there’s nothing magical about our current tech advantage. It’s the result of the better part of eighty T-years of R&D and combat experience. That’s not something the League’s going to be able to duplicate in a heartbeat, but it’s not something it can’t duplicate if we give it long enough.

“So, in answer to your question, Commodore, we’ll be here for as long as the League is prepared to not escalate. In the event the SLN should head in Montana’s direction, we’ll be prepared to ‘kick it in the snout’ hard enough to convince it that it should damned well go somewhere else. But we’ll also be thinking in terms of taking offensive action should that happen, and that will obviously require the redeployment of my main combat power elsewhere. Of course, by that time, I tend to suspect the Sollies will be a little too busy wrestling with the hexapuma to be sending anything nasty your way.”

* * *

“Midshipwoman Zilwicki, I believe?” a deep voice asked.

Helen turned quickly and found herself facing a tall, blond-haired man in a spotless white Stetson whose crown band of hammered silver and amethyst gleamed under the ballroom’s lights.

“Mister Westman!” She smiled broadly and extended her hand. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And me ’thout even a pulser,” Westman said with a slow smile of his own, shaking her hand firmly. Then he looked across her shoulder and extended his hand to the officer who’d just walked up behind her.

“Commodore Terekhov.”

The two men were very nearly the same height, with very much the same coloring, although Westman—the younger of the two—looked older. Partly that was because he was so weathered and tanned, but mostly it was because he was a first-generation prolong recipient while Sir Aivars Terekhov was third-generation.

“I’d like to think,” Terekhov replied, shaking the proffered hand, “now that we’re all citizens of the Star Empire, that we could be a little less formal, Mister Westman. My name’s Aivars.”

“Pleased t’ meet you, Aivars.” The skin around Westman’s blue eyes crinkled. “Remind me a lot of another fella I met. Right pushy, he was. Navy captain, I think. Sure do favor.”

“Well, that’s interesting. You remind me of a cowboy I met once. Stubborn fellow. Got himself into what I think you Montanans call ‘a heap of trouble.’” Terekhov chuckled. “Of course, in the end, it all worked out. He might’ve been stubborn, and he might’ve been a bit hasty, but nobody ever called him stupid.”

“Might want t’ spend a mite more time talking t’ some of my friends and neighbors ’fore you go making rash statements like that,” Westman told him. “And speaking of stupid,” he looked back down at Helen, “I’d heard ’bout the Captain’s promotion, but seems t’ me you didn’t have this—” his index finger brushed the single white stripe on her dress uniform’s shoulder board “—last time you were here.”

“No, Sir.” She elevated her nose. “I, Mister Westman, am now an ensign.”

“Which,” Terekhov explained dryly, “you can think of as the larval stage of an officer.”

“I bet you didn’t think that when you were one, Sir,” Helen replied demurely. “Of course, that was long enough ago I can see where you might have trouble remembering.”

Westman chuckled, and Terekhov smiled, pleased by the reemergence of the Helen Zilwicki who’d first come aboard Hexapuma. For the first few days after news of Hexapuma’s destruction—followed by the arrival in Spindle of Solly newsies who’d pursued her for stories about her “terrorist father” like raucous hyenas—she’d been quiet, subdued, with the sturdy independence and humor which were so much a part of her quenched. But she’d recovered since. Sir Aivars Terekhov wasn’t foolish enough to think there weren’t still plenty of dark spaces in her emotions, but the link the voyage from Spindle had given her time to heal. But then—

“And how’re the rest of your ‘Nasty Kitties’?” Westman asked.

There was a moment of intense silence, a tiny bubble of stillness in the crowded ballroom, and Westman’s lips tightened as it registered. He looked Terekhov in the eye, and the commodore shook his head ever so slightly.

“I am deeply and sincerely sorry to hear that,” the Montanan said after a moment, his normal drawl hardly noticeable. “I’d heard it was wicked. Never occurred to me Hexapuma was caught in it.” He inhaled deeply. “How bad was it?” he asked quietly.

“As far as we know at this time, none of them got out,” Terekhov said even more quietly, and Westman winced.

“Shit,” he said with soft, terrible intensity, and rested one hand on Helen’s shoulder. She looked up at him again, and the echoes of her pain looked out of her eyes at him, but there were no tears. She truly had healed—some, at least—and she held his gaze levelly.

“Can’t tell you how sorry I am t’ hear that,” he said, and he was speaking to her, not to Terekhov. “I know what you and your ship did for all of us—and especially for me, right here in Montana. No way I could ever pay you back for that, but—” his hand tightened on her shoulder “—that doesn’t mean I’m not ready to try. You need anything, anything at all—either of you” he looked back up at Terekhov “—you let me know. Might be I won’t be able t’ get it for you, but that sure’s hell doesn’t mean I won’t try.”