CHAPTER SEVEN
“And that’s all she wrote,” O’Hanraghty said as the TFN ships died inside the hologram. Another salvo of missiles ripped through the spreading wrecks, detonating at barely sixty kilometers and driving bomb-pumped lasers through their armor to rub salt deeper into the wound of defeat.
The Ishtar’s wardroom was largely empty. The long, real wooden table was made from Thraxix timber, with an almost digital pattern to the grain, and stewards cleaned out the remains of the dinner service while the task force’s senior officers sat around a holo-station at the far end of the room. The station had two seats, opposite each other, with dueling projections.
O’Hanraghty reached back behind himself to the table to pick up a glass tumbler and took a sip of whiskey. Lieutenant Commander Tanaka Amari, Commander Eduard Ortiz, and Commander Raleigh Mirwani, each in shipboard utilities, sat nearby and watched in silence. Captain Joseph Lowe, Ishtar’s CO, glanced up from his tablet from time to time.
The light from the explosions played across Murphy’s face as he leaned closer to the holo. He put one hand over his mouth, stroked his chin, and shook his head.
“You cheated,” he announced.
“Cheated? Why I’ve never been so insulted!” The chief of staff chuckled. “Let’s rewind.”
He traced a circle several times on his controls, and Murphy’s projection winked out, replaced by O’Hanraghty’s view. Ships came back into existence and backtracked over the glowing lines of their maneuver vectors. The holo jittered as O’Hanraghty skipped around the play-through.
“Now you’re just trying to cover up your malfeasance,” Murphy said.
“Nonsense,” O’Hanraghty said a bit absently. “I’m just looking for—aha! Here it is.”
O’Hanraghty stopped searching and let the recording play forward at double speed, and his League ships made a sudden maneuver, altering heading by almost forty-five degrees in a matter of seconds and going to maximum acceleration in a blinding plume of ejecta from their fusion drives.
“I saw that,” Murphy said. “The sim penalized you with onboard casualties for the acceleration spike. But you did it too early to catch me by surprise, so I—”
“So you changed your own attack vector…which put you back on a least-time intercept for the laser birds I fired during the course jink.” O’Hanraghty leaned back and took another sip of his drink.
“What? No way!” Murphy’s eyes narrowed. “I would’ve seen their Hauptman signatures!”
“Who said anything about Hauptman signatures?” O’Hanraghty inquired. “The missile drives were locked. Didn’t you notice how long it took you to run into them? Or the fact that there was no terminal maneuvering at all?”
Murphy glared at him, but the commander had a point about the initial missile wave’s time-of-flight.
“I burned through the entire maneuver stage when I launched. Between that and the launchers’ mass drivers, they had all the velocity they needed, as long as you stayed on course to close to gun range.” The chief of staff shrugged. “Given how much missile defense the Su Wukongs have, I figured you’d go for that instead of a missile duel if I gave you the opening. So I did. They still had their Hauptman coils in reserve—that was my fudge factor in case you weren’t exactly where I expected you, but—” he smiled wickedly “—they didn’t need them after all.”
“I still should’ve seen the maneuver drives’ plumes,” Murphy said.
“I masked the launch with the jink,” O’Hanraghty said, and smiled as Murphy took over the replay and zoomed into the moment a missile salvo left one of the League ships’ launchers. “That many main engine burns make a pretty blinding flare and all your sensors were looking ‘into the sun’ at exactly the wrong moment. And once the missiles burned through their fuel and went dead, they gave you damn-all for radar targets.”
“Then the sim is faulty,” Murphy shot back.
“Sir, this is Federation Commander,” O’Hanraghty pointed out.
“You sure it’s not the civilian version?” Murphy demanded, as he pulled open the settings menu. “I still should’ve seen something if it isn’t!”
“Nope. Flag edition, Sir.” O’Hanraghty swished the ice cube around his glass with a certain undeniable complacency, and Murphy glared at him. The flag edition version was updated constantly by the Oval to reflect real-world conditions. Which was why it was loaded only to the Navy’s FTLCs, not its sublight units, with access restricted only to commanding officers and flag staffs.
It was also why the FTLCs’ skippers were required to slag the server if their ships were ever in danger of destruction or capture.
The civilian edition was wildly popular among Heart World adolescents, but that version offered only a general approximation of capabilities and all the tech had to be at least ten years out of date. It was also, unfortunately, only a game, divorced from the reality of the war, as far as most of them were concerned, Murphy thought.
On the other hand, none of those youngsters playing the game knew the Oval monitored the civilian leader boards. Those who showed aptitude got surprise appointments to Officer Candidate School, and the Admin side of the house saw that they were slotted into specialties suited to their talents and not necessarily their preference.
“Good thing it wasn’t the civvie version,” the admiral said sourly, sitting back from the holo in disgust. “I sure as hell wouldn’t have been earmarked for tactical after that performance.”
Ortiz looked quickly over his shoulder to be certain the stewards had left. O’Hanraghty chuckled, and Ortiz frowned at him.
“We’re not supposed to talk about that,” he said. As Task Force 1705’s SO1, the commander was the staff officer charged with managing Murphy’s personnel and administration. “Being able to do mandatory service with the appearance of a choice keeps the desertion rate lower,” he added.
“You mean to say the Federation’s government isn’t entirely forthcoming to the people?” O’Hanraghty sneered. “I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you!”
“It all serves to support the war effort.” Tanaka straightened in her seat. “The greater good and victory is more important than anything else.”
“Let’s not dwell on the details of how the sausage is made,” Murphy said. “And let’s not discuss it with those that don’t need to know.” He gave O’Hanraghty a look, and the chief of staff shrugged.
At that moment, the wardroom hatch opened and Callum came in. His face was red from exertion, and sweat matted his hair to his forehead.
“Dad—I mean, Admiral.” Callum held up a plastic tube the length of his forearm. “I got it!”
Murphy rolled his eyes.
“He has to learn,” O’Hanraghty said from behind his glass.
Callum slapped the tube on the end of the table with obvious pride.
“Commander,” he said to Tanaka, “this ship is critically short of grid squares!”
The logistics officer bit her lip.
“Are you—” She glanced at Murphy. “Are you sure, Lieutenant? Because I remember seeing them on the manifest before we broke orbit.”
“I went to Damage Control, Fusion Two, Strike Ops Center—no one there, by the way—and several crew told me that I could get some at the particle flux monitoring station. But I think that’s on the outside of the hull, and no one was willing to authorize going EVA in wormhole space,” Callum said.
“I did find the lubricant to fix the desiccated fallopian tubing in Da—the Admiral’s quarters, though,” he went on, his face brightening. “This was the smallest unit I could find. For some reason, they keep all this all the way forward at Missile One. Good thing I got there in time. They had to do a resonance test on the mag driver clamps, and I had just the right mass to get it done.”
“They…gave you the hammer?” Murphy asked.
“Sure did. Was tapping up and down the clamps. Made chalk marks where it sounded off,” Callum assured him.
Mirwani pinched the bridge of his nose and bit his lips.
“Your first time aboard a warship?” Tanaka asked.
“How could you tell?” Callum gave the tube of lubricant a pat.
“Lucky guess,” Tanaka mumbled.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Murphy said. “You keep that handy. I may need it again later.”
“Oh. But your desiccated—”
“I took care of it,” Murphy assured him, then gestured at the holo. “Callum, you know how to operate Federation Commander?” he asked as he opened the menu and scrolled through preloaded scenarios.
“I had decent scores during college.” Callum sat next to O’Hanraghty and pulled the chief of staff’s interface over in front of him. “Never had the finesse that some have.”
“Then let’s make this a group session,” his father said. “Historic engagement. Conflict at the Brin Gap.”
O’Hanraghty glanced sideways at Callum, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly.
“The where?” Callum crossed his arms as League ships moved around a thick ring surrounding a gas giant and away from a larger Federation force.
“Callum, this is where—” O’Hanraghty began, then stopped as Murphy raised a hand.
“Okay, let’s see here,” Callum said. “Gravity wells known…composition of the rings are the usual ice and dust. Looks like our side caught them by surprise, though.”
The League sublight commander’s predicament was obvious. His force, labeled “BOGEY ALPHA,” counted only three battlecruisers—the older Fang Fengs, not the new Hou Yi-class ships—and their escorts: three heavy cruisers IDed as early units of the Shui-Shen class, a pair of light cruisers, and a destroyer division. They were hopelessly outgunned by the Federation CO’s forces: seven battleships, eight Procyon-class battlecruisers, eight Bastogne-class heavy cruisers, and two strikecarriers. Not only that, he’d been caught well separated from his own carriers. The initial range was just over 1,780,000 kilometers, but the TFN had a velocity advantage of 600,000 kilometers per second, thanks to the five FTLCs which had made a high-speed approach before dropping them into battle. Now, their jobs done, those carriers were decelerating away from the scene of the action hard. Ships like them had no business getting into shooting range of anything, and they obviously understood that.
The only good news from the League CO’s viewpoint was that the attackers’ position wasn’t perfect, despite its advantages.
It looked like the TFN had been uncertain of the League defenders’ exact positions, so the Federation FTLCs had dropped their sublight parasites in two separate task groups on approach vectors designed to converge on the gas giant, which meant they were currently out of mutual support range of one another and that even the closer of them would need almost fifty minutes of ballistic flight to cover the distance between it and his own command. Unfortunately for him, however, it also meant one of them would be on a heading to intercept him whichever way he ran, and he could never generate enough velocity to escape before one of them caught him. In fact, neither of the TFN forces carried enough fuel—or could pull a high enough deceleration—to generate anything except a passing engagement as they overflew him.
Four of the League’s own FTLCs, labeled “BOGEY BETA,” were visible at one edge of the holo display, but they were over 15,198,000 kilometers out-system of the gas giant, much too far away to swoop in and collect their outnumbered parasites even with the prodigious acceleration of a Fasset drive. Not without entering the attackers’ range envelope, at least. They could have made rendezvous with ALPHA well before the TFN reached engagement range, but it took far longer—at least twenty or thirty minutes for a battlecruiser—to dock parasites to an FTLC’s racks than it did to drop them. That meant they would still be trying to pick up ALPHA’s units when the TFN drew close enough to take them under fire, and they were far too valuable to expose to that sort of risk.
“Why are the forces so unbalanced? The Federation’s, I mean?” Callum asked with a frown. All the battleships and the strikecarriers were in one of the incoming forces, tagged “TG-1,” whereas the second force, “TG-2,” consisted only of the battlecruisers and the six Bastognes. “Our admiral could have put at least three battleships, four of the cruisers, and a strikecarrier into each force.”
“Yes, he could have,” Murphy acknowledged. His tone was oddly flat and he glanced at O’Hanraghty before he looked back at his son. “Although his intelligence wasn’t conclusive—which is why he came in split in the first place—his staff’s interpretation of the intel suggested that the League’s FTL lift would be in the inner system, so he expected the parasite commander to break in-system to evade. So he weighted the task group on the in-system vector to make it his Sunday punch. The second task group was basically insurance, in case his interpretation was wrong and they broke out-system, instead.”
“Um.” Callum frowned as he considered that, then shrugged. “Sounds a little risky,” he observed. “I mean, if he’s right, he beats hell out of them. But it doesn’t look like he guessed right after all.”
“It happens.” His father shrugged. “Want to watch the historic scenario play out before you try your hand as the Federation flag officer?”
“Why not?”
Callum punched the PLAY command, set the time compression to five, and leaned back on his side of the holo display. On the other side, O’Hanraghty handed Murphy a glass of whiskey as the assembled officers watched the tiny ships maneuver.
Orders went out from the TFN flagship to both task groups, and TG-1 began bending its vector toward out-system, but only TG-2 had a realistic chance to engage unless the hapless ALPHA was stupid enough to hang around for a suicidal engagement against them both.
Which, obviously, he was not.
Even though the RLH carriers couldn’t rescue ALPHA before TG-2 caught up to them, they were still ALPHA’s only ride home, and the League CO had gone to eight gravities on a heading toward them. That wasn’t very high by FTLC standards, but it was about the maximum acceleration he could sustain for more than ten minutes or so, even with twenty-sixth-century medicine and life support, and he’d clearly decided his only hope, however faint it might be, was to run for his carriers. He’d have to survive a passing engagement with TG-2 first, but that was better than hanging around for a suicidal engagement against them both.
TG-2, on the other hand, was decelerating at 2.3 gravities while simultaneously bending its vector closer to ALPHA’s. Its overtake velocity was so great that not only was there no way for its prey to escape interception, there would be precious little time to engage as their vectors intersected and then began diverging once more. Clearly, TG-2 was decelerating to extend the engagement window, whereas BOGEY ALPHA wanted to make it even narrower, if possible.
“Why aren’t our guys decelerating harder?” Callum asked.
“Probably because there’s not a lot of point to it,” his father said, eyes watching the icons creep across the plot. “There’s also the fact that they don’t have unlimited fuel reserves, either. The carriers have only so much tankage for their parasites, and once it’s expended, so is their ability to maneuver. But even if that weren’t true, they’re going to pass within gun range, Callum, assuming accelerations hold constant. With that many battlecruisers and heavy cruisers against what the RLH is showing, even a high-velocity pass should be pretty damned decisive. In the meantime, there’s no point beating his people up with an even higher deceleration rate. Two-point-three gees is punishing enough. ALPHA’s CO’s pounding hell out of his personnel with that kind of accel, and that’s going to have an effect when they finally engage.”
“Um.” Callum’s eyes had narrowed, and now he nodded slowly. “Good point,” he conceded. “I should’ve thought about the fuel constraints, but the acceleration’s physical effects wouldn’t have occurred to me. Not something most of the guys I’ve played Federation Commander with would’ve thought of, either.”
“No.” Murphy took a sip of whiskey. “No, I’ve noticed that civilians generally don’t think about that kind of thing. Or worry too much about casualties, as long as they win.”
“Winning is winning, Dad,” Callum said.
“For certain values of the word, at least,” Murphy replied.
Minutes ticked away, numerals spinning past on the holo display’s time-compressed internal chronometer, and the range between TG-2 and BOGEY ALPHA swept inexorably downward. Thirty minutes after the pursuit began, TG-2 was down to an overtake velocity of “only” 559 KPS. Its ships had traveled 1,043,460 kilometers in pursuit of BOGEY ALPHA, but the RLH ships had run 127,094 kilometers from their initial position, so the range had closed by only a bit under 1,355,000 kilometers and they were still over 1,600,000 kilometers apart. Effective missile range, given that geometry, was over 80,000 kilometers, however. It would drop slightly as the velocity differential at launch continued to decrease, but they’d still be in missile range within the next seventy minutes, and pass within effective gun range—no more than two or three thousand kilometers—11.7 minutes after that, at a crossing velocity of 114 KPS.
Callum yawned and stretched as he watched.
His father took another sip of whiskey and seemed to settle deeper into his chair. Another twenty minutes sped past in the holo. And then—
“What the hell?”
Callum jerked back upright as the four motionless icons of BOGEY BETA suddenly began to move. They were still over 17,900,000 kilometers from ALPHA, but they were also Fasset-drive ships, well outside the local star’s Powell Limit, and they leapt almost instantly to an acceleration of 1,900 gravities, not the paltry 8 gees of their parasites. Callum stared at them, then looked at his father.
“What are those idiots doing now?” he demanded. “If they were going to try to pull ALPHA out, they should have done it a long time ago! This is stupid!”
“Really?” his father asked. Callum stared at him incredulously, and Murphy shrugged. “I guess we’ll see,” he said.
BOGEY BETA raced through space, building its vector with all the blinding speed of the Fasset drive. Five minutes ticked past in the sim. Then ten. Fifteen. Then—
“Jesus!”
Callum twitched as a horde of fresh red icons erupted from BOGEY BETA’s quartet of FTLCs twenty-one minutes after they’d begun accelerating.
The sim updated, labeling the newcomers BOGEY GAMMA. A status bar for the new detachment spun up, and Callum’s nostrils flared as it steadied and twenty-four fresh battlecruisers, escorted by an equal number of light cruisers, raced toward BOGEY ALPHA—and TG-2—at a combined closing velocity of almost 57,000 KPS.
“Son of a bitch!” he breathed. At their velocity on their current heading, the newcomers would cut across TG-2’s position a full four minutes before TG-2’s missiles could target BOGEY ALPHA even at maximum powered range.
The wardroom was deathly still as the lethal ambush played out before them. There was no way for TG-2 to avoid BOGEY GAMMA. Indeed, the TFN task group was at a far greater maneuver disadvantage than BOGEY ALPHA had been when the Federation FTLCs arrived. Given their relative velocities, effective gun range would be enormously extended—the scarlet threat sphere delineating GAMMA’s effective Kinetic Energy Weapon envelope had expanded from no more than 5,000 kilometers to almost 120,000. Of course, that same velocity meant they would cross entirely through even that engagement envelope in only about 2.2 seconds, so each unit would have time for no more than a single KEW broadside. On the other hand, that many League battlecruisers and light cruisers could put ninety-six of the super-dense slugs into space in a single launch, distributed between only eleven targets, and at well over 76,000 KPS, any hit would deliver almost five hundred and fifty megatons of kinetic energy to anything that got in its way. No armor was going to stop that.
TG-2 was doomed. There was no way to escape that oncoming sledgehammer, and Callum knew it. But then his eyes narrowed. TG-2 wasn’t trying to evade. It had ceased its deceleration and gone to a full-power ten-gravity pursuit burn.
At that acceleration, it had to be under computer control, and its crews were almost certainly taking casualties, despite their acceleration bunks. But it also meant TG-2’s closing velocity on BOGEY ALPHA had started to climb, instead of drop, and Callum’s nostrils flared as the holo’s vector projections began to shift.
The Federation units sustained that brutal acceleration for nine minutes. Then their acceleration cut off abruptly…and they turned to clear their broadsides and began belching missiles. The range was extreme. Indeed, even at their increased closing velocity their missiles’ primary drives would burn out 70,000 kilometers short of their targets. But they emptied their magazines in the next forty seconds, and they staggered their missiles’ Hauptman coil activation to bring all of them online together.
Eight hundred twenty of the big missiles screamed toward BOGEY ALPHA in a single coordinated salvo. It was the alpha strike of alpha strikes, completely stripping TG-2 of any sustained combat capability, and at such long range, individual hit probabilities were low, to say the least. But that many missiles were enough to thoroughly saturate BOGEY ALPHA’s active defenses.
BOGEY ALPHA’s counter-missiles raced to meet the incoming fire, and they had time for multiple shots at each bird. Maximum velocity from rest for a TFN shipkiller was 1,760 KPS, and even after TG-2’s massive burst of acceleration, closing velocity at launch increased that by only about ten percent. But the attack salvo was heavily seeded with EW platforms, and the penaids drove down interception probabilities inexorably.
Almost half the original launch broke past the counter-missiles to hurtle down upon its targets. A quarter of the incoming missiles were dedicated EW platforms, covering their more lethal sisters with decoys and jammers. But that left over two hundred and fifty shipkillers for only eleven targets, and if their Hauptman coils had burned out, they still had their own last-stage thrusters. Their fusion drives came on line sixteen seconds after their coils died. Their 250 gravities of acceleration were miniscule compared to the Hauptman drive’s three thousand, but they lasted all the way in to their targets. Their fusion drives’ ability to maneuver, even at that acceleration rate, was limited, but they’d tracked their targets all the way in, and the TFN’s missile AIs were very good at their job.
Point defense lasers and autocannon fired frantically as the missiles came in on BOGEY ALPHA at 1,930 KPS, and dozens of missile signatures vanished from the plot. But the close-range point defense systems had time for only a single shot per target, and they simply didn’t have enough lasers or cannon.
The Terran League Navy favored nuclear warheads that required direct hits or at least close proximity detonations while the Terran Federation’s navy preferred the laserhead, but neither navy relied solely on a single type, and a kaleidoscope of destruction ripped across BOGEY ALPHA.
The exchange was so quick, so savage, Callum couldn’t tell how many nukes and how many laserheads were involved, but two of the League heavy cruisers and one of the battlecruisers simply disappeared, and every other unit of BOGEY ALPHA stopped accelerating as the Federation fire reduced them to tattered, mangled debris fields.
Callum stared at the wreckage for a moment, but then his eyes were snatched back to TG-2 as every one of its units suddenly blew apart. For a moment he didn’t understand. They were still short, if barely, of GAMMA’s engagement envelope and the incoming League parasites hadn’t even fired yet, so what—?
Then he saw the spreading necklaces of life pods and understanding struck. TG-2 had abandoned its ships and fired their scuttling charges rather than even try to survive the unsurvivable.
Three-point-five minutes later, BOGEY GAMMA slashed through the expanding sphere of life pods. Those pods were smaller than missiles, but they were also far slower, they weren’t made of radar absorbent materials, and unlike missiles, they carried transponders. Beacons to lead rescuers to them in the enormous, trackless wilderness of space.
And now beacons to guide their executioners’ aim.
Callum Murphy’s jaw clenched as point defense lasers and cannon ripped out with deadly accuracy and wiped those pods from the face of the universe.
* * *
Callum stared at the holo as the Federation’s surviving task group headed for safety. None of the League parasites was positioned to intercept TG-1 before it could recover to its FTLCs, but it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t much doubt about who’d won this one.
“They just…just slaughtered those escape pods,” he said after a long, still moment. He raised his eyes to his father’s face, and Murphy nodded. “But…but that’s a war crime!” Callum protested.
“Yes, it was,” Murphy agreed. “Like I said before, son, it happens.”
“But—”
“The League’s official position was that the TFN had already violated the rules of war by taking down the decoy group when TG-2 couldn’t possibly survive,” Mirwani said. Callum looked at him, and the commander—Murphy’s SO3, in charge of operations and training, which also made him TF 1705’s tactical officer—shrugged. “I didn’t say it was a good position, Lieutenant. Just the official one.
“Of course it was,” O’Hanraghty said. “All they did was execute a reprisal, wasn’t it? And the injured party is authorized to do just that in response to a violation.” Callum stared at him and he shrugged. “It’s a strained reading of the understanding that fortifications at the bottom of a gravity well must surrender when summoned to do so because their position’s ultimately hopeless and all their resistance can accomplish is to cause unnecessary casualties.”
“But that’s different!” Callum protested.
“Is it? You have to admit it does make a certain amount of sense. I happen to agree with you that it was an unjustified massacre, that it was a war crime. But this war’s been going on for almost sixty years now, Callum. Nobody who might have been deterred from committing ‘war crimes’ by the possibility of retribution expects it to end anytime soon. Or to have to face the music even if it does.”
“The boards and faxes don’t mention anything like this,” Callum said in an almost accusatory tone, but his father’s chief of staff shook his head.
“They do if you bother to do the right searches. Of course, who’s interested in looking for depressing stuff like that, right?”
Callum looked back and forth between O’Hanraghty and Murphy, then back down at the holo. He looked like someone looking for a way to disprove what he’d just seen, and he punched commands into the console. The holo lit with icons again, but this time moving backward from the battle’s disastrous conclusion at an even higher rate of speed. The butchered escape pods sped backward into their motherships’ icons, the shattered ships of BOGEY ALPHA reassembled themselves, GAMMA began its acceleration run, and—
Callum slapped the console, freezing the playback, and his eyes narrowed as he peered at GAMMA’s status bar. Then he turned and looked back up.
“Are you sure this really happened?” he asked. O’Hanraghty started to reply, but Murphy shook his head at him.
“Why do you ask?” he asked in return, and Callum frowned.
“Because the sim’s wrong,” he said, and pointed at the status bar. “They couldn’t have accelerated like that!”
“No? Not even redlining their Fasset drives? They didn’t accelerate very long, Callum. And burning out a drive node or two wouldn’t have been a disaster even if it happened.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Callum said. “That—” his index finger jabbed at the status bar again “—isn’t possible, if all of this really happened forty years ago. They couldn’t have built that kind of drive mass. Hell, we had the third-gen Fasset nodes in general fleet deployment before they did, and we couldn’t have done it—I don’t care how much we overloaded the nodes—for a good, what? Eight years, I think, after this is supposed to have happened.”
“All the sim data’s correct,” O’Hanraghty said. “I know. I was there. I watched it happen.”
“Oh.” Callum’s eyes darkened. “That must’ve been awful.”
“You were there?” Lieutenant Commander Tanaka asked O’Hanraghty. “I didn’t know that.”
“I was.” O’Hanraghty twitched a shrug. “A lot of people were. Some of us even came home again.”
“You’re right that they had to have the third-generation nodes to pull it off,” Murphy interposed, looking at Callum. “And, no, we didn’t see it in general deployment from them for quite a while afterward. Why do you think it took them so long to fit them across their entire fleet? They certainly used the tech effectively here.”
“Um.” Callum frowned, then shrugged. “That’s a good question, Dad. The manufacture wasn’t too difficult once the engineers figured out the tweaks. We rolled it out pretty quickly, not that long after this battle. I just graduated from Harriman with a degree in propulsion systems, by the way,” he told Tanaka as she raised an eyebrow at him.
Tanaka did not look overly impressed. Justin P. Harriman Academy was one of the most prestigious ship systems academies in the Federation. It was also purely civilian and sent its graduates almost entirely into safely deferred merchant marine billets.
“Top of your class?” she asked.
“In the fifth that made the upper four possible,” Callum said quickly. “But back to your question, Dad, I don’t know why they didn’t get it into general service. You’re right—it sure as hell worked for them here! Probably not a decisive factor in this one, really. Even with the older nodes, they’d have been able to pull off the ambush. But it would’ve given them a definite edge over us everywhere at the time. The only other navy with something like this was the Rish.”
The wardroom went very still.
“Oh, no,” Tanaka said into that stillness. “Not this nonsense.”
“Nonsense?” Callum hit the PLAY command and the tiny carriers of BOGEY GAMMA raced across the holo. “That doesn’t look like nonsense to me, Ma’am.”
“There are some voices within the Federation—” Tanaka said “—discredited, shrill voices—that believe the Rish have been assisting the League since the very beginning of the war.”
“That’s dumb,” Callum said. “We’ve got a nonlethal aid treaty with the Sphere.”
“We do,” Ortiz agreed. “No military equipment or technology that could be repurposed for the war effort will be sold or exchanged between the Rish and any human world. It was the Lizards’ idea.”
“And we’re supposed to just take the Rish’s word for it?” O’Hanraghty said. “The Rish have restricted our carrying trade to only a few of their systems ever since the war started in the name of ‘neutrality.’ Everything we send them has to be transshipped from the officially designated points of entry to its final destination in Rishathan hulls. So we’re not really in a position to monitor even their internal trade, much less their trade with anyone else, now are we?”
“We’re rapidly approaching tinfoil-hat territory,” Tanaka said. “The Rish are a peaceful species. Oh,” she waved one hand, “I’ll grant that they weren’t always peaceful among themselves, but they’ve obviously learned a thing or two since then. They probably had to, if a bunch as belligerent as they used to be was going to survive to get off their homeworld in the first place! All of the Federation’s trade with them is in luxury goods and foodstuffs, so they’re certainly not trading war materials with us, and they’ve never attacked a human world. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. They’ve been good-faith negotiators from First Contact. Everyone knows that.”
“A clan mother did take the head off our first ambassador,” O’Hanraghty pointed out.
“Cultural misunderstanding.” Tanaka waved it off. “The Sphere was as upset as we were after it happened, and they accepted full responsibility and offered reparations.”
“I think I’ve heard some of this before,” Callum said. “Darknet weirdos are always going on about the Rish as puppet masters, and how the Quarn have these little sucker things they put on people’s heads to control their minds. It’s lunatic ramblings.”
“If this isn’t Rishathan tech,” Murphy asked the room, “then why did it take the League so long to deploy the new-generation systems across their fleet?”
Tanaka opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again.
“Callum?” O’Hanraghty asked.
“I don’t know,” the young officer said. “Maybe this was a shakedown cruise and there was some flaw in the components, an engineering fault we don’t know about? Maybe they had to go back to the drawing board?”
“Reasonable,” Murphy said.
“Federation and League tech have been at near parity for most of the war,” Ortiz said. “We’re generally a little better than they are, but it seems like every time we inch ahead and they might be on the ropes—or headed that way—they always catch up just in the nick of time. Or even pull ahead a bit.”
“And what are you implying?” Tanaka asked. “It’s not like we can win a battle on the front line and be in orbit around Anyang dictating terms the next morning. It’s months of travel from the disputed systems to the Core Worlds. Applies to us and them. No one’s managed a strategic breakthrough since the war began, and even when one of us does score a lopsided victory, pushing on to the next major system means fighting through whatever defenses they have in place. They have time to react to our wins and bring new tech to the fight. We’ve got the same.” She shrugged. “Both sides have a defense in depth.”
“Then what’re we fighting for, if we can’t win?” Callum asked. “Even if the battles in the Beta Cygni Sector go our way, what’ll change? What did this—” he waved one hand at the holo unit “—change? It’s like it didn’t even count!”
“Really?” O’Hanraghty looked at him. “None of this rang any bells?” It was his turn to gesture at the holo. “You don’t know who died here?”
“Not off the top of my head, no,” Callum said with an impatient shrug.
“Task Group Two’s CO,” Murphy said softly. “Your grandfather.”
The wardroom was suddenly silent, and the rear admiral looked at his son.
“I was seven at the time. Studying this battle became very important to me,” Murphy said.
“Oh.” Callum looked away in shame.
“My father and six thousand six hundred and ninety-five other spacers died at the Brin Gap. And when the rest of the League’s Ninth Fleet followed it up, we lost another fourteen thousand spacers and they blew past us into the Brin System—that’s why we call this the Battle of the Brin Gap, by the way—and punched out the system fortifications. Then they hit the colony domes with a K-strike. Another six hundred thousand gone. That’s why we keep fighting, Callum. Because the League are butchers. There is no live and let live with them. Not with their current regime.”
“Not that our hands are clean,” Ortiz said, looking at Murphy respectfully. “For shared totals of civilians killed, we’re about even, aren’t we, Sir?”
“Truth is only the first casualty of war,” Murphy said. “Innocence is the second.” He shook his head. “I’ve never had to deal with a population that’s—What does the Oval call it, Harry?”
“‘Out of compliance,’” O’Hanraghty supplied.
“Right.” Murphy nodded. “I can’t say I’m unhappy that I haven’t had to deal with it, and at least I doubt that will be one of our issues during our time in New Dublin.”
“The Oval has Standing Order 15,” Tanaka said. “I don’t care for it, but it’s there.”
“There are only fourteen standing orders,” Callum said.
“Fifteen only applies to ships under combat orders,” Murphy said. “Any human population over fifty thousand is to be…neutralized if it doesn’t surrender as soon as it’s summoned to do so. It was issued after the League’s K-strikes on Aggamar killed two million people. Again, I doubt it will be a factor for us.”
“But—”
“We’re three days out from Jalal, Callum,” O’Hanraghty interrupted. “Have you finished that intake assignment I gave you?”
“No,” Callum said. “I was running around the ship and—”
“And that’s your excuse?” O’Hanraghty’s eyebrows rose. “It’s due before midnight, I believe.”
Callum looked at him for a moment, then nodded curtly and stood.
“Excuse me, Sir,” he said to Murphy, and hurried out of the wardroom without another glance at the chief of staff.
Mirwani, Ortiz, and Tanaka left a few minutes later. Lowe followed them, with a courteous nod to Murphy, and O’Hanraghty settled back into the chair Callum had left with a refreshed glass.
“Tanaka’s not with us,” he said. “She wasn’t my choice to be on the staff.”
“Nor mine.” Murphy stretched. “She’s a Yang loyalist, and that’s who she’ll report to. But she’s logistics. Not a pivotal part of the plan.”
“Callum’s going to take some time.” The chief of staff finished his drink, then popped a Teetotaler pill to kill the alcohol’s effects in a few minutes. “But he’s smart enough to see reason.”
“Just make sure there’s no video of him tapping the launcher mounts.” Murphy shook his head. “Then give him a gentle talking to about delivering me the lube.”
“I can’t believe he fell for that old trick, either.” O’Hanraghty picked up the tube and juggled it like a pen as he made for the board room door.
“I’m sorry I accused you of cheating,” Murphy said. “Have to keep up appearances.”
“You know I didn’t cheat,” O’Hanraghty said, “and I know you didn’t let me win. Better luck next time, Sir.”
He stepped through the door, and Murphy smiled after him.