HMS Prince Adrian
Madras System
June 16, 1907 PD
the officers seated around the briefing room table stood as Alistair McKeon strode through the hatch. He crossed briskly to his own place, then nodded a bit brusquely.
“Sit. Sit!”
They settled back into their chairs, and he looked around the compartment.
“It’s official,” he said. “Admiral White Haven’s sending a task group to Slocum. Rear Admiral Steigert will command it, and CruRon Thirty-Three’s drawn the short straw as BatDiv One-Seven-Two primary screening element. That means us.”
“I thought they were finally going to cut us loose for overhaul, Skipper,” Lev Carson said, and Brandy nodded mentally. Her relationship with Major Hendren might have improved significantly over the two T-months since he’d joined the ship, but the cruiser’s maintenance problems had only worsened . . . a lot. Her people had been fighting a losing battle for months, even before that; now, the situation was snowballing, and too many of her “repairs” were little more than slapdash emergency band aids. They worked, and she was proud of her people’s ingenuity in making them work, but there was no way she could regard any of them as truly reliable. They needed that overhaul, and the sad truth was that, bad as their state had become, it was still worse for other ships. In fact, CruRon 33 was well short of its assigned strength because serviceability states for four of its units—Prince Charles, Princess Adele, Prince Karl, and Cestus—had become so bad, Admiral White Haven had been forced to send them home for repairs despite the home star systems’ enormous logjam.
Their departure had reduced CruDiv 33.2 to only Prince Adrian and Princess Stephanie, and Prince Adrian wasn’t in much better shape than they’d been. In fact, there were times she wished her people were just a bit less good at their job. Just enough that she could tell Captain McKeon—and he could honestly tell fleet command—that Prince Adrian was no longer mission capable. A return to the Manticore Binary System and a few boring months waiting for yard space in a parking orbit had a certain appeal at the moment.
“I raised that point with Admiral Steigert,” McKeon replied to Carson’s question with an affable smile that was perhaps one micron thick. “Actually, I told her that despite our Engineer’s daily miracles”—he nodded down the table’s length at Brandy—“we’re way past any sane reliability margins. In fact, I told her we’re starting to push basic ship safety into the red. Her exact response was ‘There’s a lot of that going around just now, Captain.’” His jaw tightened for a second, then he shrugged. “In fairness, I don’t think she’s a lot happier about it than we are.”
“She can’t be any unhappier, Sir,” the XO said.
“I agree.” McKeon nodded. “Which is no slam on you, Brandy.” He looked at his engineer again. “When I said ‘daily miracles,’ I meant it.”
Brandy nodded back, grateful for the acknowledgment, and he returned his attention to the rest of his officers.
“I know none of you are happy to hear this,” he continued, “but there really is a method to the madness. The Peeps are still badly short of experienced officers, but they still have a lot more hulls than we do, and the officers situation’s getting better from their perspective, unfortunately. The good news is that they don’t seem to have a lot more Esther McQueens tucked away—yet, at least—so it’ll be a while before their bench is really deep enough to go toe-to-toe with us.
“That is changing, however, and from our recon probes, someone—most probably McQueen—seems to’ve convinced them to rationalize their deployment patterns pretty brutally. They appear to be concentrating heavily to cover Duquesne Base in Barnett and Trevor’s Star. Well, of course they are, since those are the obvious anchors for their defense in this area, and because of our losses and their concentration, we’re in no position to launch full bore attacks against either of them. At the same time, however, we need to keep pushing. We need to keep them reacting, make them worry about all the places we might go until we can go after the hard targets. And what we especially don’t need is to give someone like this McQueen a big enough respite to start thinking about spoiling attacks against us before we get more of our wall deployed forward. If she starts trying to do to us what we were doing to the Peeps before Nightingale, she might just have the hulls to hurt us badly.”
He paused, looking around the compartment, while he let that sink in, then shrugged.
“It’s not all doom and gloom, though. I know all of us took getting Polyphemus back as a good sign, and that’s what it was. Within the next three to four months, Admiral White Haven will be substantially reinforced from the wallers finally coming out of the yards. We’re talking battle squadrons, people, not individual ships. But until then, we need to keep the Peeps looking over their shoulders, which is what this op is all about.
“Slocum’s sort of like a reprise of Samson,” he continued. “There’s nothing there except the gas refineries, and that means it’s probably lightly picketed, if at all. Intelligence thinks they’re unlikely to have diverted a lot of combat power to cover what’s basically a useful but not vital support facility for Barnett. Sure, they’d prefer to hold onto the system and the refinery complex, but they can live without either of them if they have to, and they need everybody they have to cover Duquesne and Trevor’s Star. If they have to choose someplace to skimp, it does make sense to pick Slocum.”
Brandy considered that. She was neither an astrogator nor a tac officer, but she knew the Peeps had established their base in the Slocum System, ten or twelve T-years before the shooting started, to take advantage of its three gas giants. Slocum’s atmospheric extraction ships and refineries had been intended to provide the bulk of the reactor mass and thruster fuel for Duquesne Base, the enormous forward base they’d built in the Barnett System. Duquesne itself had been built primarily as a jumping-off point and logistics support base for their long-planned attack on the Manticoran Alliance. It had lost much its offensive value in the wake of the Peeps’ initial disasters, but it had become the linchpin of the Trevor’s Star defenses, instead. And Captain McKeon was right. If she’d been the Peeps and she’d had to leave a star system uncovered, she’d pick one like Slocum rather than one like Barnett, too.
McKeon tapped the controls at his end of the table and brought up a holographic star map above it. The Slocum System blinked alternating amber and white, but so did three other star systems, stretched in a line from the Owens System through Mylar and Slocum to Gualt. Together, they formed an arc that stretched three quarters of the way around the Barnett System.
“Welcome to Operation Mangonel, people. Just hitting Slocum probably wouldn’t get the Peeps’ attention. In fact, Commander O’Hanlon and Commander Eccles are both pretty much convinced it wouldn’t get McQueen’s, if she’s the one calling the shots.” He shook his head. “So, Earl White Haven and Captain Hunter came up with Mangonel. Hopefully not even a McQueen would be able to ignore us when we hit four star systems almost simultaneously. Admiral Kuzak will be responsible for Owens and Mylar. Sixth Fleet will have Slocum and Gualt. Because Gualt is so much deeper into Peep space—and because at last reports the Peeps had at least one battle squadron stationed there—Admiral White Haven and most of Sixth Fleet will be responsible for taking it out. To be totally honest, Slocum is pretty small beer compared to the other systems on Mangonel’s list, but taken together, they’ll hopefully convince the Peeps that Barnett is our primary objective, at least for the moment. And that, in turn, will—hopefully—convince them to concentrate more of their available wall to defend it, because every ship they have in Barnett is one more they won’t have at Trevor’s Star.”
He paused again, then cleared his throat.
“Anyway,” the captain continued, “they’ll be sending us; BatDiv Three-Oh-Three, minus one ship; and a destroyer division or two to hit Slocum. We’ll take a look, and if Intelligence is wrong and they’ve got a picket too strong to take, we back off and settle for jumping around the hyper-limit perimeter like fleas on a griddle. At the very least, we should be able to make them nervous. But we’ll also take along half a dozen tankers from the Fleet Train. If the system’s not held more heavily than ONI expects and we can pull it off, Admiral Steigert figures there’s no reason all that nice reactor mass the Peeps are busy refining couldn’t fuel our ships, instead.”
He smiled with genuine humor for the first time, and two or three of the officers around the briefing room table chuckled. Then he shrugged.
“It’s more likely they’ll blow the tank farm as soon as they see us, but we might get lucky. And Intelligence wants the base’s computers. They don’t expect us to find anything earth shattering, but we got a lot of useful information from Mathias, so it’s probably worth trying to do the same thing at Slocum.”
“It’s always worth trying, Skipper,” Carson agreed. “Of course, they’re just as likely to scrub the files as blow the tank farm.”
“I didn’t say anyone really expects us to get our hands on their files, Lev. But, like you say, they’d like us to try. We’ll see if we can hack our way in while we’re there, and one of our mission objectives is to haul their servers home with us for the forensics people back in Manticore. That’s going to be your people’s job, Clint.” He nodded at Hendren. “We’ll be putting you aboard their main platform. And I’m sending Brandy along as senior officer onboard and to keep the lights on and bird-dog the computers for Anderson.”
He twitched his head at Anderson McCloskey. Prince Adrian’s com officer was an excellent cyberneticist, as well, and he nodded back to McKeon. Then the captain looked at Lieutenant Commander Chen.
“In some ways, I’d prefer to send you, Brian,” he said. “Truth be told, I think you’re a naturally more devious and suspicious soul than young Anderson, better suited for dealing with the wicked Peeps if they try to hide stuff. But if anything hits the fan, I want you closer to home running Tactical, just in case. And let’s face it, Anderson’s better with computers than you are. In fact, just about anybody’s better with computers than you are, now that I think about it.”
“I’m crushed, Skipper. Crushed!” Chen protested.
“And if you understood anything more subtle than a pointed rock when it comes to breaking into an enemy database, I might have let you go anyway,” McKeon replied dryly. “I said you were more suspicious than Anderson. I didn’t say you were smarter.”
McCloskey buffed his fingernails on his tunic, then blew on them complacently, and Chen grinned.
“Okay.” McKeon let his chair come fully upright and plugged in a data chip, and a file header appeared in the briefing room holo display. “We need to go over the rough—at this point, very rough—ops plan, but I did manage to get one promise out of Admiral Steigert.”
They all looked at him, and he shrugged.
“We’re not the only unit of the Slocum task group who’s overdue for a date in the yards. In fact, everybody they’ve picked for this little shindig is almost as overdue as we are, people. Assuming we manage to steal the Peeps’ reactor mass, we’ll send the tankers back to the fleet with the destroyers. Then the rest of the task group—including Prince Adrian—will continue straight home to the Star Kingdom.” Brandy’s eyes brightened, and McKeon smiled at her. “I understand the Hephaestus yard dogs can hardly wait to see us!”