Change of Command

Chapter Sixteen

The attack came on a dank gray afternoon, with thin rain spitting out of a low sky and visibility just reaching from the parapet of the exercise courtyard to the administrative offices. Gelan Meharry had outside duty, and had checked the first three posts when he found that number four was missing. Even as he thumbed the control on his comunit, he felt the prickles rising on his arms. Not at night after all, but with enough daylight to see if his body caught on any of the rocks.

“Spiers here,” came the answer to his call. Spiers, whom he had not seriously suspected.

“Number four outside post’s empty,” Gelan said. “Should be Mahdal—has he called in?”

“No, Corporal. Want me to check sickbay?”

“Request backup at this post,” Gelan said. “And run a com check on the others, would you? Then check sickbay.”

“Sure thing.” Spiers’s voice sounded normal, with only the slight concern appropriate to a missing sentry.

Gelan looked around. Number four post gave its occupant a view of the prisoners’ exercise court, the entrance block beyond, the upper part of the administrative block overlooking the forecourt, which was itself out of sight, and the peak of the stack itself rising beyond that. To his left he could see the helmet of number three post; to his right and down, on the outside of the entrance block, he should have seen the bright dot that was number five.

He didn’t. He leaned out over the parapet of number four, to check the path below. There, far below, a bright yellow splotch, and a white dot near it.

He used his com again. “Spiers, this is Corporal Meharry again. There’s a man down on the westside path. Have you raised number five yet?”

“No, Corporal.” Now Spiers did sound worried. “Sergeant says he’s on the way. Want me to call Medical?”

“Better do it. I’ll go on down and see . . .”

As the blow fell, he lunged forward, so that his skull took less than the intended blow. The unexpectedness of that lunge loosened his captors’ grip, and he got in another good shove as he went over the edge.

For an instant, hanging in the air with the sea spread out below him, he was euphoric. They hadn’t knocked him out; he’d fooled them. He was going to make it; his plan would work.

Then he was close enough to see the height of the waves—mere wrinkles from above, here taller than he was, and smashing into the sharp rocks. And no helmet, he thought, just as he plunged into water so cold it took his breath, with force enough to nearly knock him out.

He fought his way to the surface by blind instinct, helped by the surge of the rising tide. When he shook the water from his eyes, he saw a black wall rushing toward him, covered with sharp shells. He threw out his arms; the water slammed him into the rock with crushing force, but the PPU gloves protected his hands, and then his body, from the sharp edges of the shells, and the wrist grapples locked onto the surface. When the water dragged back, he was able to stay on the rock. In that brief second, he curled up, jamming his boots into a crack, and deployed the PPU’s lower grapples.

Cold water roared over him again, smashing him into the rock, then sucking his body away . . . the grapples held; his arms and legs strained. In the next trough, he released the wrist grapples, flung himself upward, and locked the wrists again just as the next wave hit.

Minute by minute he fought his way upward, racing the tide and the limits of his own strength. Distant clamor battered his hearing, even over the roar and suck of the waves. He looked upward, only to get a faceful of cold water.

Just above high tide, well within the splash zone, he clung to the rock. Despite the PPU, he was chilled; without it, he would have been dead. He could feel his arms and legs stiffening from both cold and bruising, and out there somewhere . . . the killers were looking for him.

Gelan stripped off the last of his duty uniform, ripping it free with the grapple claws of the PPU. He hoped it would look like the damage of sea creatures if the killers spotted it. Underneath, the PPU’s programmable outer surface took on the mottled dark color of the rock . . . now if they looked down, they would see only rock, not a splash of yellow. He unhooked and unrolled the hood, and pulled it over his head. At once he felt better; the hood cut the windchill. He sealed it close around his face, then pulled up the facemask. The last bite of the wind disappeared. He wasn’t comfortable, but he was no longer in danger of hypothermia. Not soon, anyway.

He touched the controls on his chest, and the PPU’s circuitry delivered a boosted audio signal. Another control released a fine antenna to pick up transmissions.

“—Went over right there, sir. No chance to grab him—and he went right down—may’ve hit his head on a rock—”

Darkness closed in early. Gelan could see lights above; he waited until they were gone, then longer: they would be scanning in infrared as well. Though his suit reflected almost all his body heat inward, to protect him from the cold, a sensitive scan could pick up a human shape in movement. But well after local midnight, he moved—stiffly at first, then more smoothly—toward the lava tube where—he hoped—his survival kit was still concealed.

Once in the mouth of the tube, he risked a brief flash of his torch. There it was.

And there was Commander Bacarion, a weapon levelled at his chest.

“I thought they might have underestimated you,” she said. “I didn’t.”

He said nothing.

“I will be glad to take your ears,” she said. “I might even send one to your family.”

The thought of Methlin’s reaction if she got one of her little brother’s ears in the mail made him grin in spite of his fear. “Do that,” he said.

Then tossed his torch aside and dove toward her dominant hand, and used the suit grapples to catch and fling himself in a tumbling arc toward her. Her weapon fired, but the needle went wide. Gelan pivoted on one suit grapple, and slammed both booted feet into her side; he felt the crunch of bone and heard her grunt, but it was dark now, and she wasn’t dead. She would have more than one weapon.

He scrambled towards her, raking with the suit grapples. A thin red beam appeared, the rangefinder of her next weapon, and the sharp crack of a hunting rifle turned to the clatter of falling rock where it hit. Gelan felt something with one glove, and yanked hard; she cried out, then something slammed into his shoulder. He swung elbows, knees, feet, and took hard blows himself, barely softened by the suit. Then the blows weakened; he hit again and again. And again.

Silence, but for the sound of his own breathing, and the pounding of waves outside the tube. Was she dead, or feigning? Had she been alone? He fumbled around, trying to find the torch, but finally gave up and used the suit’s headlamp.

Bile filled his mouth. His suit grapples glistened, brilliant red in the light; he had torn her face off, in that last struggle. An ear dangled from one grapple tip. He shook it free.

She took ears.

He was a Meharry.

He was a Meharry who had killed an officer, an officer who was, as far as anyone knew, his legitimate superior merely doing her duty. He couldn’t just go tell the sergeant about it. Not this time.

Methlin had said there would be days like this, he’d told himself often enough. She had never told him he might have to murder his commander and then figure out how to explain it.

He needed to search Bacarion’s body. Surely if she intended some serious wrongdoing—beyond having him killed—she would have some evidence on her. She would not trust everything to an office safe. But not here, not where her confederates might be on their way, alerted by some signal he knew nothing about, or simply by her failure to show up at a meeting. If she had evidence on her, he would have to take her corpse along, or they would destroy it.

A gust of icy wind curled into the tube and it resonated like a giant organ pipe. Was it a storm coming? He couldn’t wait. Grunting with the effort, Gelan dragged his purloined life raft down the tube to the lip, and then considered what to do with Bacarion’s body. Finally, he decided to bring it along. It was heavier than he expected, awkward to heave and tip into the raft, but he secured it carefully before shifting the raft—and himself—to the very edge of the rock.

A more violent gust of wind caught it and whirled it through the air to land hard on the water; Gelan almost lost his hold. Even through the PPU, he could feel the water’s chill, and its power. He yanked the vent control, and the raft ballooned around him. Bacarion’s body lurched into him as the raft whirled, tilted, whirled again, on the wild waves.

Daylight came late, and weakly; the raft was driven ahead of sleet-laden wind over tossing waves that had long since relieved Gelan of everything in his stomach. He didn’t want to use his headlamp to find the medkit; it might be seen from the base. So in the dingy gray light, with Bacarion’s grisly stiff corpse rolling into him with every lurch of the waves, he finally spotted the medkit on the raft’s bulwark and edged over to it. He peeled back the glove of his PPU, opened the medkit, and found the antinausea patches. In a few minutes, he felt slightly better, and very hungry. First, though—he used the raft’s suction pump to clear bloodstained water from the raft’s interior, and dared a peek out the canopy.

Nothing but tossing waves, dimpled by sleet, receding into murky dimness. At least they were out of sight of Three Stack. He resealed the canopy and explored the rest of the raft interior.

It had been designed to hold eight crash survivors. Tucked into one compartment was a manual—the same one, he realized, which he had read so carelessly that other time. On the first page, he saw a diagram of the raft, clearly marking the location of the water purifier, the direction finder, the food stores, the repair kit . . .

Lieutenant Commander Vinet waited none too patiently for the signal he expected. Today or tomorrow, Bacarion had said, depending on weather. It had to be cloudy, so that nothing would show on a satellite scan if the scan hadn’t been disabled; it had to be daylight enough that her men could be sure Meharry was safely drowned. With the storm moving in, surely it had been cloudy on Three Stack—it had been cloudy here since before dawn, and as evening closed in an icy mix of sleet and snow pelted windows.

He ate dinner as quickly as possible. If only he could contact her—but she had forbidden it, and he knew her to be a ruthless critic of those who disobeyed. Something had caused a delay—certainly the next day would be the one, then. He fell asleep at last.

Morning brought the height of the gale, the waves below beaten down by wind, scraped by sleet into patterns that looked as dangerous as they were. Through triple insulated windows he felt the power of that gale, the chill of the wind. By noon he was unbearably restless again, pacing from desk to window and back, then down the passage to the little enclosed overlook that gave him a clear view of the entire west end of the stack, and across to several others. No more sleet and snow, now, nothing but the cold wind; the two trees in the courtyard below flailed bare limbs against the wall that protected them.

Towards evening, the storms slid off to the south, and cold green light speared under the trailing edge. Still nothing. Something had gone very wrong indeed. What should he do now? He couldn’t contact any of the others; Bacarion controlled the recognition codes. He couldn’t do anything with the research teams or the weapons without additional forces. Bacarion knew he had only a few reliable men. She knew that, and still . . . he made himself sit down again, but nothing could quiet his mind.

Gelan had lashed the commander’s corpse to the far side of the raft, repaired the slashes he’d accidentally put in the inner hull, eaten, and slept again. The storm had eased, but he had no idea where he was in relation to the Stacks. Fear of being blown back to them warred with fear of drifting on the vast ocean until he died. Death either way—which was worse?

Surely the commander’s conspiracy, whatever it was, didn’t include everyone on the planet. He ought to be able to count on the people at Search and Rescue, if no one else.

He looked at Bacarion’s corpse, and shuddered. He could not bring himself to look for papers or whatever else she might have had. Well, then he could write his account of what happened: the survival manual had a thick pad of water-resistant sheets and a waterproof marker. Gelan hadn’t written anything by hand in years, but he decided to put down what had happened before he unlocked the beacon. That way, even if he died, there’d be some record of events from his point of view.

If someone didn’t just destroy them.

No use thinking like that. He set the pad on his knee, and tried to form legible writing as the waves lifted and dropped. It was harder than he’d expected, and after three sheets, he gave up.

“Commander Bacarion’s not in her offices, sir.” Sergeant Copans looked worried. “The commander’s not answering any call, and the locator’s not lit.”

“If it’s not one thing it’s another.” CPO Slyke didn’t need this. Corporal Meharry’s carefully staged suicide had gone exactly as planned, along with the murder of Major Dumlin, the senior unaligned officer. But Bacarion should have been there, unless she was playing some game of her own . . . and even then, she should have been back by now. Her games were usually short ones.

CPO Slyke had been a member of the Loyal Order of Game Hunters for sixteen years, the first enlisted recruit. He had served with then-Major Lepescu, and admired the officer’s grasp of the real nature of war—a test of survival, of ultimate fitness. Born and raised on Calydon by Priorists who believed that fitness in this life was determined by effort in the life previous, Slyke knew he had earned his superior skills and toughness.

Now, facing the implications of Bacarion’s disappearance, he knew his moment had come. Although he had not been briefed on the whole mission, his part had required him to know more than any other NCO and most officers. He could—he would—take over.

They had been lucky. Severe weather cut off communication immediately after the commander’s disappearance, giving him time to do what he could to obscure the evidence, and search the buildings. The underground storage and lava tubes were an obvious target. He insisted on leading the search party himself, with his most trusted companions, all full members.

The commander had left tagtales. Very sensible of her. What had she known about that he didn’t, and why hadn’t she told him? He pushed that thought aside, grunting as he squeezed into the second tube.

There. The search lights picked up the glint off the hunting rifle’s barrel first, then he saw the little red dot on the far wall. The laser sight was still on, the power pack unexpended. His breath came short. Was it a trap? Her trap, to test her followers? The sea boomed outside, and filled the tube with a wash of cold wet air; the walls glistened with it.

Closer . . . and he realized that some of the glistening surface was blood, not seawater. Smears and pools of blood, a few shreds of flesh . . . and something had been dragged, something heavy, from here to the edge of the tube, to the sea, where a crumpled wet tarp lay, its edge flapping with every gust of wind.

That damnable, conniving, fornicating Corporal Meharry must have survived the fall . . . climbed here, hoping for refuge—no, to retrieve a life raft he’d stowed here. And the commander had figured it out, had been waiting for him, only in the struggle one of them had killed the other (such a lot of blood, and he was a man who could estimate spilled blood accurately) and escaped in the raft.

But which? Logic said Meharry; Bacarion would have come back.

Unless that was part of her plot. Unless she had planned to betray them all, and escape herself. She had, after all, come down here without telling anyone. Perhaps she had counted on Meharry’s death, and the life raft was for her own use.

He chewed his lip, trying to figure it out, and finally decided it didn’t matter. They were in it up to their necks, and a witness—which witness didn’t matter—had escaped.

He would have to go on with it. Too many clues might remain, even though he had used a firehose to flush the lava tube of evidence. If they could get offplanet before the person in the life raft made contact with anyone, the plan could go on as originally formed.

He ran his thumb under his belt, along the strips of ears that he had taken. They were, he was sure, only the beginning.

Within the prison population, tension had risen in the past few days. Prisoners studied jailers in both their roles, as the predators they had been (and were in spirit) watch prey, and as the prey watch predators around them. Slyke knew exactly which prisoners were supposed to be released, but his own assessment suggested a few additions. First he had to find a way to contact the conspirators in orbit, and convince them of his identity.

Establishing the contact was easier than he’d feared.

“We heard.” The voice contact, generated from random snips of synthetic speech, would defeat voice recognition software.

“Ready to initiate Bubblebath,” Slyke said.

A long hissing silence. Then—“You?”

“Better go ahead,” Slyke said, leaving out “sir” with an effort. “Investigation of the major’s disappearance—”

“Affirmative. ETA stage one?”

Slyke had calculated this carefully. “Two-seven minutes plus original.”

“Good.”

Now he had to signal his fellows. Sergeant Copans and Sergeant Vinus looked worried, but heard him out.

“But sir—with the commander’s disappearance, Fleet Security will be all over us like crushers on a broken spacer.”

“Yes, and if we wait around here, chances are they’ll find something the commander left that will incriminate us. Either we do it now, or there’s a very good chance we’ll be in there”—he jerked his thumb at the cell block’s outer doors—“with them. Is that what you want?”

“No, but—”

“Did you earn your ears, Sergeant?”

“Yessir.”

“Then hop to it.”

R.S.S. Bonar Tighe requested permission from Traffic Control to practice LAC drops into the Big Ocean. Many of the warships which visited Copper Mountain took advantage of the opportunity to test their drop crews. Traffic Control approved the drop zone—200 klicks south of Stack Islands—and also advised them that the only traffic was a prop jet doing SAR to the northwest.

Bonar Tighe’s crew had coalesced around the charismatic Solomon Drizh, hero of Cavinatto, and just too junior, like Bacarion, to be closely investigated as a Lepescu protégé after the admiral’s demise. The conspirators had learned from the mutiny aboard Despite, and the proportion of those supporting Drizh and his allies was much higher in every ship, the chain of command much tighter. This time they were not acting for the Benignity, but for themselves . . . the Loyal Order of Game Hunters.

Fleet had gone soft, Drizh had declared; the whole Familias Regnant had gone soft as a rotting peach. With anyone of real vision in charge, there would have been no piracy, no incursion by the New Texas Godfearing Militia—and certainly no attempt to preserve the lives of those scum once they’d taken the Speaker’s daughter. All the NewTex worlds would be taken, their vicious militia subdued . . . though Drizh had to admit that he rather admired the men who would attack big ships with little ones.

The Loyal Order of Game Hunters had survived Lepescu’s death and, in the years since, had even grown. Its leaders used one political event after another to demonstrate the need for more toughness, a more realistic attitude towards war, more loyalty between brothers in arms. Weakness in high places—from the king’s abdication to Lord Thornbuckle’s inability to keep his daughter in line—proved the need for a stronger, more warlike, military arm.

Like Lepescu, they saw themselves as more loyal, more dedicated, than other Fleet members, and the others as wishy-washy, irresolute, and ultimately ineffective. They recruited widely, more often in the NCO levels than Lepescu had—as Drizh said, if their founder had a fault, it was his misplaced belief in high birth.

The removal of senior NCOs and flag ranking officers because of problems with rejuvenation gave them an obvious window of opportunity. The following burst of temporary promotions gave the group a flag rank member again. He might be only an admiral-minor, and only for the duration of the emergency—but that emergency would last long enough for his purposes.

Bonar Tighe’s three LACs dropped into atmosphere under control of the orbital Traffic Control. Atmospheric Traffic Control on Copper Mountain was minimal except near the main training centers—and the Big Ocean had none. Once below 8000 meters, they were automatically untagged on orbital screens.

Still they stayed on course until under 2000 meters, when they angled northward, towards the Stack Islands.

CPO Slyke did not know exactly how Commander Bacarion had intended to deal with the prisoners and guards who were not part of the conspiracy. For his part, he had no intention of leaving witnesses behind, even on that isolated base. When the storm passed, and the radios once more punched through with the usual demands for daily reports, he’d had to say something to divert suspicion, and had reported Meharry and Bacarion both as “missing, presumed swept away by waves.” Incredulity had followed; he knew that someone would send an investigative team as soon as possible, along with a new CO. No one must be left to talk about it. Even if the mutineers gained support of the orbital station, they wouldn’t have the whole planet by the time someone could get here and write a damning report.

His confederates first took care of those members of the staff who were not part of the conspiracy. Those bodies he left in place . . . he hoped later investigators would think it a prisoner breakout. Killing the uninvolved prisoners was another matter. He had them brought out into the courtyard and then turned the riot weapons on them. They had time to scream . . . and when the prisoners he’d recruited came out, they were more respectful, just as he’d hoped.

By the time the LACs were in atmosphere, he had the prisoners lined up and waiting. The most reliable had the weapons and PPUs out of the guardroom. When the first LAC screamed out of the sky, and settled on the cold stone of Three Stack’s landing pad, Slyke didn’t wait for the hatches to open—the men were in motion, running. The first LAC lifted, and the next settled in place. Sixty more men raced aboard, just ahead of another rain squall. Then another sixty, and another. Slyke rode the last one up.

Behind him, a driving rain battered the corpses sprawled in the courtyard, washing the blood into gutters, and finally through drains down into the sea. When the squalls moved on, the seabirds came, and for a time made a column of flickering wings above the towering stack.

Bonar Tighe’s LACs screamed south, and rose from their designated drop zones back to orbit an ample twelve minutes before Martin-Lehore finally fixed MetSatIV’s glitch.

MetSatIV picked them up at near-orbital level, but they were outbound, carrying Fleet beacons; the satellite’s AI tagged them as friendlies.

The first LAC eased into Bonar Tighe’s drop bay and settled onto its marks. Pivot Anseli Markham, who always read manuals and followed them to the letter, aimed the hand-held bioscan at its fuselage.

“Put that down,” growled her boss, Sergeant-minor Prinkin.

“But sir, the manual said—” Anseli goggled at the readout. The LACs had gone out empty, with flight crew only, and her instrument was showing dozens and dozens of little green blips.

“Put it down, Pivot; it’s out of order.”

“Oh.” Anseli racked the instrument. So that’s why it was showing troops aboard an empty LAC. “Should I take it to the repair bay, Sergeant Prinkin?”

He gave her a sour look. “Do that, Pivot. You’re no damn use in here anyway.”

Anseli unracked the bioscan and headed toward the repair bay. She was tempted to turn it on and see if it worked when it didn’t have to read through hull material, but she could feel Sergeant Prinkin watching her. He’d never liked her; he was always sniping at her, and she tried so hard . . . she let her mind drift into her favorite reverie, of how much better she would treat pivots when she made sergeant-minor.

The repair bay for small scan equipment was out of sight of the LAC service bay. Once around the corner, Anseli experimented with the bioscan. When she pointed it at her foot, a green blurry foot-shaped image appeared. When she aimed at the squad coming down the passage, it showed all eight of them. When she aimed it at a bulkhead, there were two squatting shapes . . . and then a rush through the water pipes that made her blush. She hadn’t meant to do anything like that.

Chief Stockard, in the repair bay, took the bioscan and gave her forms to fill out.

“But I think it’s working now,” Anseli said, trying to fit the entire thirteen-digit part number into a space only two centimeters long. Print clearly, the directions said, but how could she print clearly that small? And why did she have to fill out forms at all, when the computerized ID system would read the part number right off the bioscan itself? She did know better than to ask that one; it wasn’t her first trip to the repair bay. “I tried it on people coming along here, and it always registered them.”

“If your sergeant said it wasn’t working, then it wasn’t working,” Stockard said, folding his lips under. “It may be working now, but it wasn’t working then. What was he trying to do when he said it malfunctioned?”

“He wasn’t using it, Chief. I was. I was taking a bioscan reading of the incoming LAC, just like it says to do in the manual, and he said put it down, it’s not working right. And I guess it wasn’t, because it said the LAC was full of troops.”

“LACs usually are,” Stockard said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

“But they dropped empty,” Anseli said. “I was there; I scanned them going out, just like the manual says, and they carried only flight crew. It was just a practice flight.”

Stockard froze, his hands flat on the counter between them. “Are you saying the LACs went down empty and came up full?”

“Well . . . no, sir, not really. They couldn’t have. It’s just this bioscan unit, but since it’s malfunctioning—”

“You just wait there a minute.” Stockard turned away, and Anseli could see him talking into a comunit, though she couldn’t hear him. He turned back, shaking his head, still muttering into the comunit. Then he gave her a rueful look. “I guess it malfunctioned . . . I just asked Chief Burdine if the LACs carried troops, and he said no. Oh—he says for you to take a detour up to Admin and pick up the liberty passes for the section. We’ll be docking in a few hours.”

“Yes, sir.” No chance that her name would be on the list, given Sergeant Prinkin’s animosity, but maybe he’d go, and she’d have a few hours of peace.

Chief Burdine, on the LAC service bay deck, strolled over to Sergeant Prinkin as if making his usual round of stations. “Just had a call from Stockard in repair—that idiot pivot of yours told him all about the malfunctioning bioscan showing the LAC full of troops. I think Stockard bought my assurance that they’re empty, but how much chance that pivot will blab to someone else about the bioscan reading?”

“Near a hundred percent,” Sergeant Prinkin said. “The girl’s got no sense.”

“Is she popular?”

“She’s got friends. Hard worker, shows initiative, always willing to help out.”

“A milk biscuit.” That with contempt.

“Oh yes, all the way through.”

“I wish we didn’t have any of that sort aboard,” Chief Burdine said. “They could have a happy life milking cows somewhere; what’d they have to join Fleet for?”

“For our sport,” Sergeant Prinkin said.

“That’s true.” Burdine grinned at him. “Though it’s little sport someone like her will give us.”

Running up to Admin from the repair bay meant running up a lot of ladders, which other people seemed busy running down. Again and again Anseli had to stand aside while one or more officers or squads of NEMs clattered down. She wasn’t really in a hurry, because the longer she was away from Sergeant Prinkin the better, but standing at the foot of ladders wasn’t her idea of fun. Her mind wandered to the LACs and the bioscan. If LACs could drop and pick up troops . . . or drop troops off . . . why couldn’t they pick troops up? Go down empty, come back full? And if you didn’t bioscan the LACs, how could you tell?

“Stand clear!”

She flattened herself to the bulkhead yet again, not really seeing the uniforms flashing past her. What if there were people on the ship who weren’t crew? People from down on the planet?

Of course, everyone on this planet was Fleet, so it didn’t matter. Did it?

Anseli knew that pivots weren’t supposed to think—well, not beyond memorizing instruction sets in manuals. But she’d always had a sort of itchy feeling in her head if she didn’t get things straight. Machines either worked or they didn’t, in her very clear interior universe. A bioscan which reported on real, verifiable human-sized beings behind one wall didn’t turn liar and report that there were people where there weren’t any. That very same bioscan unit had reported nothing in the LAC holds when the LAC left . . . when it was known to be empty. So how did the sergeant know the LAC was empty when the bioscan said it was loaded with troops? Sergeants knew everything, but . . . her mind itched.

A non-itchy part of her mind began its own commentary on the crew members who kept coming down the ladders. There had been no general alarm, so why were the ship’s security details on their way to the LAC bays?

By the time she reached Admin, her mind was worse than a case of hives, and the only way she knew to scratch it was ask questions. The chief in Admin growled and handed her another job to do. How was she supposed to learn if no one answered her questions?

Bonar Tighe reported its LACs recovered, and requested and received permission to dock at the orbital station. This, like the request to practice LAC drops, was standard procedure, and the Traffic Control gave Bonar Tighe a docking priority assignment based on her ETA. The stationmaster approved station liberty at the captain’s discretion, and forwarded the station newsletter. Ships of Bonar Tighe’s mass could not microjump so close to a planet, so the cruiser had to crawl patiently in a spiral to catch up with the station, a process which took several hours.