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HMS Prince Adrian

Madras System

April 11, 1907 PD


Alistair McKeon rapped his spoon against his water glass.

The ancient attention-claiming signal chimed musically through the buzz of conversation, and heads turned toward him. He gazed down the long table at the diminutive midshipwoman seated at its far end.

Midshipwoman Felicia O’Toole drew a barely perceptible deep breath, picked up her wine glass, and rose to her majestic hundred and sixty centimeters.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she raised her glass, “the Queen!”

“The Queen!” rumbled back in response as other glasses rose all around the table, and Brandy Bolgeo smiled as O’Toole settled back into her chair, her expression only slightly touched with relief.

The midshipwoman had just turned twenty-two, and she’d boarded Prince Adrian, along with fellow middies Bryant Atwater and Lawrence Shakoor, less than two weeks ago. Brandy remembered her own middy cruise, how terrified she’d secretly been that she’d somehow screw it up, despite all her hard work and preparation at the Academy. But at least—her smile faded—she hadn’t had to worry about being killed in action before she was twenty-three.

“Thank you, Ms. O’Toole,” Captain McKeon said gravely, then leaned back in his chair and regarded his guests with a thoughtful expression.

There were quite a few of them—Chief Brodzinski had been forced to use both extenders, and the lengthened table filled even his dining cabin almost completely—and he considered them gravely for a moment or two.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said finally, and Brandy saw some of the others smile at the polite formula courtesy required. She’d sometimes wondered what would’ve happened to an officer who’d declined his CO’s “invitation” to dinner. She was pretty confident the situation had never arisen, since a junior officer that stupid probably also forgot to breathe without being reminded.

“It’s good to see you all here,” the captain went on. “Most of us have been through a lot together by now, and the newcomers”—he smiled at O’Toole and Shakoor; Atwater had the bridge watch and had been unable to attend—“seem to be fitting in well. So far, at least, Which, of course, any middy had better do! Trust me, you two do not want to find out what happens to midshipmen who don’t fit in.”

Shakoor’s gray eyes widened ever so slightly, but a reassuring chuckle rippled its way around the table, and O’Toole smiled back at the captain.

“As those of you who have been around a bit longer than our newcomers know,” McKeon continued, “I try to dine with my officers on a fairly regular basis. It’s a lesson I learned from probably the best starship captain I was ever privileged to serve under, and I commend it to all of you as your own careers progress. But tonight, as you may have noticed, the table is a bit more crowded, and that’s because this is a special occasion. We’re here tonight to say goodbye to someone who’s served aboard Prince Adrian for well over two T-years. During that time, he’s been a pillar of strength when we needed one, an outstanding mentor to his own subordinates, and one of the best examples of what it truly means to be one of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines.”

He picked up his glass again, raising it slightly, and nodded to Viktor Yestachenko.

“If I may be just a few days premature, Major?” he said, then looked at the other seated guests. “Ladies and gentlemen, will you join me in offering our well-deserved congratulations to Colonel Yestachenko?”

“Congratulations!”

The response filled the compartment, and Brandy realized she was on her feet—that all of them were on their feet, except Yestachenko. The Marine must have heard the sincerity in all those voices, because somehow the face that had always said whatever it was supposed to be saying seemed to have escaped his control. In fact, he reached up and wiped an eye as surreptitiously as possible.

“Speech!” Brian Chen said with a huge grin, and Lev Carson took up the chant. They even began clapping rhythmically, and Yestachenko lowered his hand and glared at them. But then McKeon raised his own hand, stilling the tumult.

“Let’s not get too rowdy,” he said with a smile. “We’re all Queen’s officers, if you’ll recall. That means that a certain standard of behavior is required of us.” He paused a beat. “Even those of us who happen to be Marines.”

“Oh, thank you, Sir,” Yestachenko said. “You’ve made me feel so much better.”

“You’re a Marine!” McKeon’s smile segued into a grin. “Suck it up, Colonel!”

Laughter rumbled, and Yestachenko glowered at the entire compartment. It was a remarkably insincere glower, Brandy noticed.

“Well, as it happens, Marines, unlike mere naval types, always have contingency plans,” he said. “My well-honed tactical instincts suggested the high probability of an unscrupulous ambush of this nature, and like any good Marine, I came prepared.”

“That sounds vaguely ominous,” McKeon observed, then shook his head. “I may regret this, but the floor is yours, Viktor.”

“Thank you, Sir.” There was less humor in Yestachenko’s tone—and expression—as he stood and faced McKeon’s assembled guests.

“The truth is that I’m genuinely torn,” he said simply. “Obviously, I’ve always wanted a colonel’s planets, but I never realized how much a part of me would hate giving these up.” He touched the three golden pips of a major which adorned his collar. “I’m looking forward to the challenges, now that they’ve decided to trust me with an entire battalion, but a part of me—a huge part of me—will still be right here, with Baker Company. I’m going to miss everyone aboard this ship, but I’ll especially miss you three.” He looked across the table at his platoon commanders, who sat very straight under his eyes. “I haven’t told you often enough how satisfied I’ve been with you and how enormously proud I’ve been of you,” he told them. “I have never asked something of you and not gotten it, and believe me, I know how often and how far beyond the mere ‘call of duty’ you—all of our people—have gone for me.

“I know that you’ll give the same loyalty, the same integrity, to Major Hendren when he reports aboard. In the meantime, of course, the Company will be in your hands, Isaiah.” He looked directly into Lieutenant Gillespie’s eyes. “Take care of it for me.”

“I will, Sir,” Gillespie promised, and Yestachenko nodded.

“Good!” He cleared his throat and nodded again. “Good.”

He picked up his own glass, looked down into it for a moment, then raised it.

“Ladies and gentlemen—my friends—join me, please, in a toast.”

Shoe soles scuffed and clothing rustled as everyone in the compartment rose, and he turned his head, sweeping his gaze over all of them.

“To the finest ship I have ever served in,” he said. “To the finest crew I have ever served with. And to the finest body of Marines, I have ever commanded. May God hold you in His hands, preserve you from harm, and give you the victory every one of you absolutely deserves.

“Godspeed, Prince Adrian. Cool heads, strong hearts, stout ships, and damnation to the Peeps!”

* * *

Much later, Brandy sat in front of her terminal in her much smaller cabin. At least as Prince Adrian’s senior engineer, she didn’t have to share it with anyone, and she luxuriated in that sense of privacy as she recorded her letter to her parents.

“So we’re all going to miss him,” she said. “I can’t tell you where he’s going, of course, but I will say that it’s no more than he deserves, and that I’m sure he’ll do just as fantastic a job there as he’s done here, and that’s a pretty high bar to clear.

“And, to be honest, sad as we all were to see him go, I think we all really needed that dinner. That party. The chance to share our hearts and hopes with each other. It’s been a tough couple of months.”

She knew her expression and her tone were giving away more than she really wanted them to, but that was okay. They were her parents. They deserved the truth . . . and there was no point trying to fool them, anyway. Her dad was far too well tapped in to Navy channels to not know what had happened in Nightingale, what it meant. And the House of Winton had always leveled with its subjects. No one would give away any tactically or strategically critical information, but while Navy communiqués might occasionally omit information, conceal ship movements, they never lied. That had been Manticoran policy since Queen Adrienne’s day.

And that meant her parents knew how brutally Sixth Fleet had been hammered.

She hit the pause icon and sat back, pinching the bridge of her nose as her eyes burned with unshed tears. They might be unshed now, but they’d flowed—oh yes, they’d flowed—before now.

Four ships. That was how many of Sixth Fleet’s ships-of-the-wall had never left Nightingale. HMS King Michael, HMS Hydra, HMS Prometheus, and HMS Thunderer. King Michael and Thunderer had died in the missile exchange before Admiral White Haven turned toward Bogey One. The other two were simply torn apart in the indescribable violence of a point-blank energy exchange between ships-of-the-wall. Sixth Fleet’s merciless missile fire had wreaked havoc with Bogey One before that, which was the only reason White Haven hadn’t lost even more of his wall, and the final tally at the end of the battle had been a clear tactical victory for Manticore. Killing those four RMN ships-of-the-wall had cost Bogey One seventeen of its own, and all fifteen of its survivors were damaged, at least two of them almost certainly beyond repair.

But if only four of Sixth Fleet’s wallers had been destroyed, six more had been removed from its order of battle by damage. As an engineer, Brandy doubted that Kodiak Maximus would be worth repairing, and HMS Myrmidon would need a minimum of eight months in the yard. HMS Casey and HMS Vindicator might need almost as long in the repair slips as Myrmidon, and all four of them were superdreadnoughts, not dreadnoughts. Landing City and Hero would probably need only a month or two, but between repair time and the personnel casualties they’d taken, neither of them would be returning to the battle anytime soon. In fact, it was likely none of them would be back in service before the end of the year, so they might as well have been destroyed right along with their dead sisters.

Taken altogether, that represented forty-two percent of Admiral White Haven’s pre-Nightingale wall-of-battle, and under other circumstances, at least two more of his ships would have been sent home for repairs, as well. Instead, Juan Navarro had working parties aboard HMS Hyperion and Victorious—and half a dozen other ships—laboring with their own engineers and damage control teams to fix the damage which was too “light” to justify pulling them back for repairs. Like Nike after Hancock station, they were too desperately needed to be sent home until replacements were available.

Sixth Fleet was too vital to be left understrength, so those replacements—and reinforcements—were already in the pipeline. In fact, Polyphemus had returned to BatRon 17 only two days ago. Her reappearance after her damage in Mathias was a welcome shot in the arm, and it left Baroness Triplett’s squadron only a single ship short. But it would take weeks—at least—to make up Sixth Fleet’s other losses.

Intellectually, Brandy understood that the Peeps’ losses in Nightingale had been far heavier than Sixth Fleet’s. Abdur O’Hanlon’s best estimate, based on Sixth Fleet’s own sensor data and two cautious reconnaissance flights since the battle, was that the final ratio had been better than three-to-one in Manticore’s favor. Thirty-two PRN wallers—over 229,900,000 tons of starship—had been destroyed or put out of action for months, compared to only ten Manticoran wallers with a combined tonnage of “only” 72,350,000 tons. But Sixth Fleet had also lost almost twenty-nine thousand men and women. She could hope the Peeps had rescued at least some survivors from the ships they’d lost, but even if they had, Havenite POW camps had been an ugly enough experience under the Legislaturalists. She didn’t really want to think about the camps something like State Security would produce. And the truth was that losses aboard King Michael and Thunderer, at least, had to have been pretty much total.

All of that was bad enough, but in many ways, it was almost minor. Oh, the agony of lost friends was horrible for all of them, and she suspected it would get even worse once time eroded the anesthesia of shock. It had certainly been that way for her after Hancock. But what hurt even more, in a lot of ways, was less the number of ships the Peeps had destroyed, the number of people they’d killed, than the way they’d fought.

By any meterstick, Nightingale had been a tactical victory for Manticore. Outnumbered two-to-one and taken completely by surprise by Bogey Two, White Haven had not simply fought his way clear but inflicted far heavier losses than he’d sustained. Brandy was an engineer, not a tactician, but Janet Briscoe was a tac officer to her toenails, and as far she was concerned, Hamish Alexander had just proved he could walk across Jason Bay any time he chose. Sixth Fleet had trusted its commander before Nightingale; after it, it idolized him.

But, also by any meterstick, Nightingale had been a strategic victory for the People’s Republic. For the first time, a Manticoran attack had been not simply stopped, but thrown back with heavy losses. And any Peep who looked at the tactical data from the battle would realize Sixth Fleet’s escape—and “escape” was the only thing it could be called, Brandy knew—had been a matter of minutes. Possibly even seconds. Any hesitation on White Haven’s part would have spelled disaster . . . and both sides knew it.

That same tactical data made it clear the People’s Navy had a steep mountain still to climb before it became the RMN’s equal in battle, but the losing side always learned more by losing than the winning side learned by winning. The Peeps were going to make up ground, and the days in which Manticoran strategists and tacticians could take their own Navy’s superiority for granted had disappeared.

At least White Haven’s screen had emerged from Nightingale unscathed. As he’d anticipated, Bogey Two’s wallers had gone after the Manticoran wall-of-battle, hoping to at least help run down any cripples, rather than waste time pursuing ships whose acceleration they could never match. For now, most of those cruisers and destroyers would find themselves covering the fleet train and escorting convoys, not hunting down Peeps. For that matter, Sixth Fleet was pretty much anchored to Madras, covering it against a possible Havenite attack, until its losses could be made good.

It was . . . unlikely someone like Earl White Haven would stand around with his hands in his pockets. He understood the importance of maintaining as much momentum as possible, and unless Brandy missed her guess, that meant Sixth Fleet would continue its hit-and-run attacks, continue its efforts to prune back Havenite numbers. She suspected he’d approach the operation more cautiously than before, but she never doubted that he’d press the pace just as hard as he could.

In the meantime, however, reports from the home system made it dismayingly clear that the logistic logjam hadn’t gotten any better. White Haven’s cripples would make bad a hell of a lot worse, in that respect, and according to Janice, frontline commanders were even being cautioned about ammunition supplies. Not even the RMN, which had embraced the gospel of missiles over the old dogma of energy-range, had realized how heavy its missile expenditures would be in an actual shooting war. The less innovative Peeps almost certainly had smaller prewar stockpiles than Manticore, but that was remarkably cold comfort just at the moment. What Sixth Fleet and Bogey One had done to one another at close range in Nightingale only reemphasized Manticore’s need to exploit its missile superiority. To stay clear of any Peep energy batteries, pound away from ranges where its pods and better laserheads gave it the clear edge. But it took a lot of missiles—even with RMN capital ship laserheads—to kill a superdreadnought. And according to Janice, the Fleet had burned through over three T-years of peacetime missile production in substantially less than one year of active operations.

We can’t keep this pace up, she thought, staring at the frozen display in front of her. We just can’t. Sooner or later, we have to stop and regroup. We know it, and I’m pretty sure whoever had the . . . intestinal fortitude to put together something like their battle plan in Nightingale has to know it, too. And I guess it’s worth running risks where things like maintenance and overhaul cycles are concerned if we can keep pushing at least a little longer. Push them back a little farther, buy ourselves a little more defensive depth. But Adrian’s already in the red for at least a quarter of her systems. There’s a limit to how long my people can keep them up and running.

Her jaw tightened, but then she shook herself.

Sitting around worrying wouldn’t solve a thing, and it wasn’t like she was the only engineer worrying about her ship! If misery loved company, she was one of a multitude of well-loved people.

She snorted, lips twitching with sour amusement at the thought, then cleared her throat and tapped the icon to resume recording.

“It’s been rough,” she told her parents, “but I hear there’s a lot of that going around, and the ship and I are in good hands with Earl White Haven. The people out here love him. Man, do they love him! And with damned good reason. He’s the best. He really, truly is. So don’t worry about us too much.

“In the meantime, there seems to be a glitch in our communications traffic. Somehow the last info packet from home overlooked the soccer scores. And it happens that your daughter has placed a small wager with her executive officer on who’s taking the Simpson Cup this year. So, if you could see about getting those numbers out here, I would appreciate it. The last I heard, the Jaguars had dropped all the way back to third place in Gryphon Central. I do hope you’re going to tell me that’s not the case, because if you don’t—”


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