False Colors

CHAPTER 11

FRLS Karga

Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System

2670.321-355

They had plenty of volunteers from amongst the Nargrast survivors, both human and Kilrathi. All of Murragh’s Cadre officers were eager to follow their prince’s lead. That, Bondarevsky decided, was only to be expected. They were loyal to the hrai of his uncle, the late Admiral dai Nokhtak, and Murragh was now the last living representative of that clan in addition to being heir presumptive to the throne. Their branch of the hrai had long been rivals of Thrakhaths, so they had no great feelings of loss regarding their erstwhile war leader. As for Ragark, he was considered something of an upstart, and evidently wasn’t thought of as a proper Kilrathi warrior at all. So the collection of Kilrathi experts were willing to mobilize at Murragh’s word to aid the humans in restoring the ship. Their comrades, crewmen from the crashed escort and a number of surviving fighter pilots off the carrier, were more suspicious. A few, taking their cue from the embittered Kuraq and others like him, refused to have anything to do with the hated “apes.” They remained in open confinement aboard the City of Cashel while their comrades got down to work.

The Goliath Project staff needed all the help they could muster, and inside of a few days the assistance of Murragh’s people was already proving invaluable.

Time after time it seemed as if they would not be able to get the job done, but time after time the men, women, and kili working on the Karga rose to the challenge and somehow made things work. Bondarevsky was continually amazed at the adaptability humans and Kilrathi could bring to bear when they tried. Slowly, painfully, it began to look as if the Karga would one day sail the void once again.

With the tender docked and the bodies rounded up and cleared, the first job was to repair Karga’s shattered hull. The ship had suffered major penetration damage in a score of places, and minor holes in countless other compartments. The tender’s force fields allowed the carrier to retain an atmosphere, but the hull needed to be patched as soon as possible so that the energy expended on keeping the atmosphere from leaking away could be used for more productive purposes.

So the first order of business was brute-force space construction on a massive scale. It started with survey crews swarming over the hull, measuring, recording, locating the major breaks in the hull and transmitting detailed images of each to computer records aboard the dozens of shuttles detailed to support their work. The computers analyzed these records and produced detailed specifications for the sections of hull plating needed to fill the gaps. A pair of naval architects attached to Diaz’s team pored over each of the computer models as they were completed, double-checking the work. Humans were far slower than computers, but it still sometimes took an organic mind to make sense of engineering designed for organic life, and despite the bottleneck created by these reviews Admiral Richards overruled Tolwyn and ordered the process to go on.

The factory ship Andrew Carnegie had settled into orbit close by the Karga. Swarms of smaller carried craft had been dispatched to Nargrast loaded with automated vehicles and small supervisory crews. They set up camp near the site where Graham and Murragh had settled with their castaways, the vehicles ranging outwards in search of needed raw materials according to a list provided by the computer analysis of the needed components and modified by Diaz’s team where the computer parameters couldn’t be easily met. Unfortunately Nargrast was poor in many of the elements that would nave been best suited for the job, but there was plenty of iron ore, and that was still the basis of the most basic parts of the hull that needed repair.

The vehicles excavated and extracted ores where they were discovered, carried them back to base, and loaded them aboard the ships waiting there. A constant string of vessels operated back and forth between Nargrast and the Andrew Carnegie, endlessly feeding the insatiable demands of the factory vessel for the raw materials necessary for fabricating Karga’s hull plating and other requisite components. A landing party from Tohvyn’s crew also worked over the remains of the escort Frawqirg, following up on the initial survey work Bondarevsky had done while rescuing the survivors. Though badly damaged in the crash and far too small to provide all the needs of the damaged carrier, the escort was a useful source of parts and materials that otherwise wouldn’t have been available.

Aboard the factory ship, the iron ore was smelted and processed, refined and re-refined to produce the durasteel alloy needed for hull plating. The computer designs obtained from the first surveys controlled the pouring, shaping, and cutting of the individual patches or replacement hull sections, and as quickly as they came off the line they were released into space, picked up by the one-man work pods carried aboard Sindri, and maneuvered into the proper places. The pods-essentially egg-shaped capsules with thrusters and manipulating arms, barely larger than a man-were supported by work gangs of spacesuited crewmen who wrestled the hull plating into position and then brought their plasma welders to bear to seal the new segments of the hull in place.

Space construction work was difficult and dangerous, especially on the scale required for Project Goliath. With so many crew members operating in spacesuits, there were bound to be accidents. A few inevitably forgot that weightless hull patches retained all of their mass and inertia in zero-g, and as a result there were casualties. Commander Katherine Manning, Karga’s Medical Officer, was kept busy handling fractures and decompression sickness in the carrier’s sick bay complex buried deep on the fifth deck of the superstructure. Fortunately little damage had occurred there, and the sick bay area was even air-tight, so she had less work to do to get her part of the ship up and running and could concentrate on taking care of the injured. But with power still limited and the unfamiliar Kilrathi medical equipment mostly off-line, Manning complained bitterly of having to perform surgery under primitive conditions, using a field surgery package normally used by marines planetside to fill in for the usual amenities that weren’t yet available aboard Karga.

There were, of course, fatalities. The first major replacement to the buckled hull plating around the entrance to the starboard side flight deck proved particularly awkward, and when Crewman Chan misapplied thrust to his work pod at a crucial moment the result was three men dead, crushed between the new plating and the hull, and five other injuries. Chan was one of the dead, and his pod was ruined in the accident.

Bondarevsky, who had been supervising the work, wondered if Geoff Tolwyn wasn’t more concerned at the loss of the pod than at Chan’s death. It wasn’t that the admiral was callous…he was merely consumed by the need to finish the job, a man so obsessed as to seem unable to perceive reality.

One by one, though, the major patches were welded into place. Other spacesuited crewmen worked their way painstakingly along the outside of the hull, using a liquid patching compound to fill in the smallest holes and marking those too large for their attention but too small for the major pieces. These were dealt with by follow-up crews armed with small plates that could be sealed over an opening and then spot-welded. By the time they were through Karga’s hull was a bizarre patchwork quilt, but she would hold atmosphere without the assistance of Sindri’s force fields.

Bondarevsky’s role in the exterior work was limited to getting the flight decks repaired. Early on Richards gave him priority in the waiting list for patches and parts, since the faster the flight deck could be restored the more easily personnel and supplies could be transferred aboard. For the first two weeks, until the bulk of the patches were in place and the testing of hull integrity was well in hand, the salvage team and the crewmen working with them had to be shuttled back and forth each day from the City of Cashel. It was only after they could be reasonably confident the ship wasn’t going to suddenly lose atmosphere that crew members could begin moving in to quarters on board on a more or less permanent basis.

All these considerations meant that work on the starboard flight deck was first on the list of things to be done, with Bondarevsky in personal charge of the details assigned there. The physical problems of repairing the wrecked hull and deck plating didn’t take long to finish, but once that was over there were myriad details to deal with. The force field airlocks at each end of the flight deck had to be repaired and tested, and the massive clamshell doors that sealed off the deck when flight operations were not in train had to be put in order so that the crews working inside didn’t have to rely entirely on the force fields while they were performing tasks too delicate to be done in space suits. Bondarevsky left most of the actual flight deck work to the supervision of Sparks McCullough, who knew more about the cycle of flight deck operations than most of the Landreicher crew was ever likely to learn. He concentrated on a related section of the ship, the Flight Control Center, located on the deck below the CIC where Admiral Tolwyn was hard at work attempting to restore some semblance of order to the carrier’s most vital command and control systems.

The FCC was actually a whole suite of related compartments, each individual chamber responsible for one aspect of the supercarrier’s flight ops. Central to all was Primary Flight Control, the nerve center which oversaw all of the fighters, bombers, and support craft operating off the carrier at any given time. Primary Flight Control was relegated to a fairly low position order, however, since it would still be a long time before regular flight ops were conducted off Karga. Instead, Bondarevsky focused on CSTCC-the Carrier Space Traffic Control Center-located directly forward of the Primary Flight Control compartment. CSTCC governed the operations of craft in space within five kilometers of the carrier, and oversaw launching and recovery of all craft. The compartment had received only light collateral damage from the hit that had blasted CIC, but this structural damage had to be made good before anything else could be done. Banks of instrumentation had to be removed in order to install bulkhead patches and deck plating in CIC, using lighter versions of the hull patches that had been applied to the ship’s exterior. Then the instrumentation had to be returned, with each system being thorough checked and tested before being installed to ensure that everything was at least potentially in working order. Two of the most vital systems in CSTCC relied on repair work being performed elsewhere on Karga: the sensor arrays located near the top of the carrier’s towering superstructure, and the communications system. Fortunately these were high on everyone’s priority list, and Diaz had specialists tackling these systems almost from the very beginning. Still, it was over a week from the time the CSTCC was physically restored until the first tests of ship’s sensors and communications, and two more days went by after that tracking down a series of small but disabling glitches.

In fact, the computers came on-line before the sensors were fully working, and that was accounted a minor miracle by anyone with more than a smattering of computer knowledge. Given the vast differences in design philosophy between human and Kilrathi technicians, it had been touch and go for a time. In fact, it wouldn’t have been possible to get the computer systems up and running at all without the active assistance of Hrothark, the Kilrathi Cadre Computer Officer who worked with Diaz’s experts to modify their code to something the Kilrathi computers would recognize as usable. Fortunately the computer network was designed not only for redundancy and flexibility, but for a high degree of self-programming. Once Diaz and Hrothark introduced the basic directives into the system the computer net itself did most of the work of developing operating systems. Still, the sheer number of different jobs the computer had to oversee in order for the ship to work required a great deal of programming time, and even after the computer system was on-line and functioning programmers were continuing to introduce new routines as they became necessary. Computer control for environmental systems was introduced first, followed by sensors, communications, and the ship’s power grid. But minor errors continued to be almost constant reminders of how much they had to do, from the periodic shutdown of gravity and light in the crew quarters on Deck Six to the fault that caused the entire computer system to crash every time someone tried to send a passenger lift to the ship’s recreation section.

When at length the CSTCC came on-line, Bondarevsky was ready to turn control of the section over to Commander Juliette Marchand, who had been designated as the carrier’s Space Officer, more often referred to as “the Boss.” Marchand, like Bondarevsky, came from the Confederation Navy. She had previously served aboard the TCS Ticonderoga, but had drawn a court-martial and dismissal from the service for willfully assaulting a superior-the Confederation Secretary of Defense, no less-after the man had interfered with her disciplinary decision with regard to a subordinate during an inspection of her carrier soon after the Battle of Earth. A small, dark-haired woman who tended to wear coveralls emblazoned with the motto “Boss,” Marchand was nothing short of brilliant when it came to handling CSTCC operations, but she had a short fuse and a habit of regarding “her” bailiwick as a private fiefdom, not to be interfered with by anyone, even the Wing Commander who rated as her nominal superior. Under Marchand’s iron hand, the starboard flight deck entered normal operation three weeks after the repair job began. But Bondarevsky’s job had only just begun. Traffic Control could control the launch and recovery of small craft from the flight deck, but there was still plenty of work to be done. The three massive elevators that raised and lowered planes from the cavernous hangar deck beneath the starboard flight deck had to be overhauled before the carrier could pretend to be more than a platform for outside craft to land on. Unfortunately two of them had been seriously damaged, one by the hit that had crippled the approach deck, the other by Graham’s scavenging missions, who had adapted some of the equipment that operated the aft elevator for use in repairing their planetside shuttles. By ruthlessly scrounging for parts from Graham’s gear and the remains of the aft elevator they were able to make a start at fixing the forward one, but it was slow going at best and would leave them with just two working elevators on the starboard side. Bondarevsky knew from long experience that this would severely handicap flight operations in a combat situation, when a fast turn-around of planes was essential to maintaining the carrier’s battle capabilities. He tried not to think too much about what they had deduced about Karga’s last battle, since confirmed by Murragh. Limited flight operations had left the supercarrier unable to stand against a pair of cruisers which otherwise would never have been able to approach close enough to be so much as a nuisance.

There was one bit of good news, though. In the process of getting the elevators and the hangar deck back into operation, Sparks was able to pass on the report that many of the Kilrathi planes in the starboard side hangar deck were useable. Each flight deck had its own hangar area, so the starboard side represented roughly half of the complement of aerospace craft on board. Out of sixty-four fighters, bombers, and support craft allocated to the starboard side, thirty-seven were arrayed in their storage bays and appeared undamaged. There were also seven Darket light fighters and four Strakha stealth fighters on the surface of Nargrast, bringing the total up to forty-eight. The port side hangar hadn’t produced these had taken greater losses during the raid on Landreich, and less than twenty were reported as spaceworthy. But other damaged craft would be useful sources of parts when they had to start getting the flight wing into active service.

Bondarevsky was less sanguine when he considered the problems of training Landreich and ex-ConFleet pilots to use Kilrathi planes, and bumped a request for simulator programming and hardware repair up on the Flight Wing’s priority list.

Sparks was happy, at least, at the prospect of getting her hands dirty tearing down Kilrathi planes and then putting them back together so they could start flying. But Bondarevsky had to hold her back. By this time the starboard flight deck was starting to cycle regular flights on and off the carrier, and even the refueling and repair equipment was starting to come back into play. But with all this accomplished, they had to turn their attention to the port side and start all over again.

In the meantime, work was proceeding in other parts of the ship. The flag bridge, which had never been seriously damaged, was back in operation on a limited basis early on, and as more and more of the shipwide systems came back on-line the role of the crew manning it expanded. This was the domain of Admiral Richards, who spent most of his time poring over the intelligence files extracted from the computer during the reprogramming process. With the addition of Murragh’s experts he was no longer needed to explain every bit of Kilrathi technology to the salvage team or the carrier’s crew, which meant he was under much less strain now. But he continued to drive himself to become as familiar as possible with the ship, and to keep himself fully updated on the strategic situation that faced the Landreich.

Tolwyn, meanwhile, started in on CIC, cheerfully working side-by-side with the lowest-ranking technicians to tear down control systems and put them to rights. The Combat Information Center had been damaged by the same hit that had crippled Primary Flight Control, but there wasn’t as much destruction here as on the navigation bridge four levels up and all the way forward on the carrier’s superstructure. That section was given a few rough patches and then given up as a bad business, to be repaired later as time and resources allowed. A working CIC would allow Karga to maneuver and fight, and that was all Tolwyn wanted of her. Each day, Bondarevsky was impressed with the change in Tolwyn’s bearing and attitude. The demands of making the repairs work had narrowed the admiral’s world so that he no longer spent so much time worrying about conspiracies and the interplay of politics and war across the whole of human space. Instead he had a job to do, something that he could measure day by day, and the way he threw himself into it was a positive inspiration for the rest of the officers, crew, and outside specialists.

Most of the other officers were up to the challenge, too. Diaz and his people performed miracle after miracle despite the technological difficulties of working with Kilrathi gear. Contrary to popular belief, the Cats were by no means backward or primitive; they had been in space longer than Mankind, though their technology wasn’t far ahead of the Confederation’s in any major respect. Nor was their equipment simpler or more rugged despite the common conception back home of the Kilrathi as brutal and violent. Many of their systems were surprisingly fine and delicate, though of course there were differences in the size of components that reflected the larger bodies and hands of the builders. But it was differences in basic design philosophy that gave the specialists most of their headaches. Kilrathi naval architects believed in redundant and diversified systems, and not just for computers. They frequently designed subsystems that could back up not one but several radically different primary functions, which made it hard for Diaz or his people to point to one single place and say “There is the backup for the system we’re working on.” It made it difficult to know when backups were on-line, and almost impossible to discard any components, no matter how little they seemed to have to do with any particular ship’s function, without extensive testing, physical tracing of connections, and heated discussions among the experts. Sometimes the Kilrathi Cadre could help out, but not always. Fifty specialists covered a number of critical fields of expertise, but they were not ship-builders, and their specialties were often in areas removed from the nuts-and-bolts design process.

By the time Bondarevsky was getting ready to tackle the port side flight deck, the carrier was close to functioning as a ship again. She had computers, sensors, environmental systems, and communications up and running. Of her eight laser turrets, six were back online thanks to the heroic efforts of Lieutenant Commander Dmitri Deniken, the Tactics and Gunnery Officer. The other two probably wouldn’t function again this side of a keel-up repair at a major spaceyard, but Deniken had managed to come up with arcs of fire that covered the entire ship. He also had hopes of getting the numerous point-defense turrets working again once they managed to track down a computer glitch that made the automatic intercept function useless.

The one area where repair work lagged behind was Engineering. Commander Kent, the chief engineer recruited by Kruger for the project, was another ex-ConFleet man, but turned out to be something of a plodder. The wild leaps of imagination and creativity needed to come up with improvised solutions to unexpected problems simply weren’t for him. His by-the-book overhaul of the fusion power plants fell further and further behind schedule as he ran into trouble balancing the magnetic containment fields badly stressed by the final battle and the effects of long neglect and interaction with the brown dwarf’s radiation. Finally Tolwyn, furious at the continued delays, had relieved him of duty after a blazing row. His choice to replace Kent was little short of brilliant. Donald Scott Graham, late of TCS Juneau, became Karga’s new chief engineer. It was highly irregular-technically the man was still on active duty with the ConFleet, though they didn’t know he was even alive. But Tolwyn himself retained his admiral’s authority, and as ranking Confederation officer in the star system accepted Grahams resignation from the service, placed him in the inactive reserve, and then swore him in as a Landreich officer. Hopefully they would be able to sort out the paperwork later. In the meantime, though, Karga acquired a Chief Engineer who knew exactly how to go about the recommissioning job. Many of his solutions to problems skirted the regs in more ways than one, but they got the job done. Slowly, the engineering department began to catch up with the others as Graham took hold of his new responsibilities.

The end of the year was fast approaching, with two months of work behind them, and the Goliath Project crew could look back at solid progress. But the work ahead remained daunting. They had the second flight deck to put back into service, and all of the Kilrathi planes to check, overhaul, and put into action-if and when they could get pilots trained on the craft. Graham had the fusion plants back on-line and was working on the shield generators, but these were in particularly bad shape and were likely to be slow. In the interim they continued to rely on Sindri for anti-radiation shielding, but the tender’s extended shields couldn’t handle combat conditions, and until they could put up a reliable combat-rated force field the carrier wasn’t anything more than a particularly large and unwieldy dock floating in space. And as yet nothing had been done about her engines, maneuver drives and the hyperspaee jump system.

Still, it was progress, more than Bondarevsky, for one, had ever believed possible at the outset. Another few months and they might actually have a fighting ship.

If, in fact, Ragark gave them another few months.

Operations Planning Center, FRLS Karga

Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System

1445 hours (CST), 2670.356

It was a measure of their progress that they now could hold their conferences aboard Karga, rather than assembling aboard Independence. The Operations Planning Center for the supercarrier was located adjacent to the admiral’s ready room and the flag bridge, and was considerably more impressive than the escort carrier’s cozy conference room. In the center of the large chamber was a holographic projection tank that could display anything from tactical dispositions of a squadron to starcharts of entire sectors. Seats rose in tiers on all four sides of the oval compartment, allowing senior officers from several ships in a battle group to attend the briefing at the same time. Each person had a computer terminal attached to his seat which allowed him to call up details from the holo-tank, and there was an excellent intercom system that allowed everyone, no matter where he or she was in the room, to take full part in the discussions.

Jason Bondarevsky had chosen a seat near the top tier by the door, well out of the way. He’d learned to watch and listen at these conferences, but saved his input for times when he could tackle Richards or Tolwyn in private. Too many voices arguing over priorities or procedures was a sure recipe for chaos, and the Goliath staff had proven this on more than one occasion over the last two months.

Richards was in the place reserved for the Kilrathi admiral, near the head of the oval in a private box seat something like a small throne. Tolwyn had a less impressive version of the same accommodations at the other end of the holo-tank, the spot where a Kilrathi intelligence or political officer would have been accommodated in an Imperial vessel.

The rest of the room was well-filled. This particular conference was far more extensive than the usual daily briefings, including officers from other ships of the battle group as well as the carrier’s department heads and other important members of the team. The progress made to date had allowed Richards to convene this meeting to begin a new phase of the project.

“All right, people, the sooner we get started the sooner we can get out of here.” Richards’ voice came through clearly over the intercom headset Bondarevsky, like the rest of the assembled staff, was wearing. The original Kilrathi earpieces had been too large and bulky for humans to use, so Lieutenant Vivaldi, the Communications Officer, had raided the City of Cashel for a supply of marine tactical transceivers. Murragh and his fellow Kilrathi wore the original gear. They were clustered on one side of the holo-tank, a block of nonhumans who somehow seemed out of place now on their own ship. “Mr. Bondarevsky. Status?”

Bondarevsky cleared his throat. “Primary Flight Control will be on-line this afternoon, or so Mr. Diaz has assured me.” He glanced toward the salvage specialist, who gave a little self-satisfied nod. “That means that by tomorrow morning we’ll be able to start pretending we’re a real carrier. If the sensors behave themselves, we should be able to track anything in this part of the system, although I’m still worried about the interference from the brown dwarf’s strange radiation. A brown dwarf just isn’t supposed to cause this much trouble. And the ring system still drives our sensor probes crazy.”

Richards smiled. “Why should the sensors be any different from the rest of us?” he demanded. That raised a few laughs, from humans and Kilrathi alike. “Excellent work. With PFC and the starboard hangar deck up and running-and Mr. Deniken’s weapons in place-this boat can start looking after herself. Commander Tohvyn?”

Kevin Tolwyn nodded. “Your capacity will be limited for a time, but I’d say you won’t need us to look after you…if you have the planes to fly your own patrols.”

“Exactly.” Richards frowned. “I’m not about to start using our Kilrathi planes yet, not until Mr. Bondarevsky’s training and simulation program is running. In the meantime, by the power invested in me by our beloved leader, Old Max, I am hereby ordering half of the Independence Flight Wing detached for duty aboard Karga.”

Galbraith was quick to react. “Now wait just a minute, Admiral,” he said. “I don’t think-”

“Spare me, Captain,” Richards cut him off. “I’ve already discussed the matter with Admiral Camparelli. And you know my orders give me broad discretion for requisitions of this type. At any rate, you’ll have replacements waiting for you at Landreich when you head back there next week.”

“Head back?” Galbraith frowned.

‘That’s the point to all this,“ Richards said. ”Old Max made it quite clear that he wanted Independence back on active service again just as soon as we felt we didn’t need her for protecting Goliath any longer. Well, we have guns and we have a flight deck. With half a flight wing we can handle most standard operations, and when we get our people trained on the Kilrathi birds and get the other flight deck up to speed we’ll have everything we need here to protect ourselves. Independence is to make her way back to Landreich to link up with a new battle group. You can make good your shortages of planes there.“

“I…suppose that will work out all right,” Galbraith said.

“Good. Commander Tolwyn, you may assign whichever of your squadrons you see fit, of course, though I would suggest that you balance the two wings as best you can. Consult with Mr. Bondarevsky. I’ll approve whatever TO amp;E the two of you come up with.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Kevin Tolwyn said, turning a brief grin on Bondarevsky.

“Do you see any further difficulties in starting flight operations, Captain?” Richards asked, looking at Bondarevsky.

“No, sir,” he replied. “Nothing major, at least. Starboard side’ll be crowded for a while, with all those Kilrathi birds in the hangars, but there’s a fair amount of room to spare. Luckily the Cats built this tub with the idea of having to operate all their birds with one crippled flight deck.”

“Too bad for them they didn’t actually do it,” Marchand said from here place a few seats down from Bondarevsky. “You may not think it’s a major problem, sir, but as far as I’m concerned juggling all those planes is going to be a nightmare. How soon until we can start shifting a few of the Kilrathi junkheaps over to port side?”

“Probably a couple of weeks, Boss,” Bondarevsky told her. “Until then, you’ll just have to make do. I’ve seen you work. You’ll handle it.”

“Good,” Richards said. “Now, Mr. Graham, what’s our schedule on shields and drives?”

“That same couple of weeks, sir,” Graham replied. “That is, if we don’t run into any more trouble with the shield generators. I’m not happy about their power consumption. I’m pretty sure the battle damage was a bit more than the initial surveys showed. There was a hell of a lot of energy soaking through the whole system when Juneau and Dover hit the old girl, and I don’t think Commander Kent’s first estimates took into account the overload factor.“

“From here on out, Commander, I think you should have priority on all resources,” Richards said. “I’m not happy sitting on a ship that can’t break orbit and can’t defend herself in a combat situation. I know we’re off the beaten track here, but a Kilrathi raiding squadron could ruin our whole day. Any comments?”

No one argued with the decision, though Bondarevsky could see several department heads looking grim. Too many jobs, too few resources, that was the story of the Goliath Project from start to finish.

“All right, other points.” Richards consulted his computer terminal. “Damn, it’s printing out in Kilrathi again. Armando?”

Diaz keyed a command into his terminal, and after a moment Richards gave a faint smile. “That’s better. Actually, I can read Kilrathi. Last week I think it was giving me Gaelic.”

“Probably got confused by Lieutenant Harper’s folk-sing in the rec room,” Bondarevsky suggested. “I know I did.”

“Be that as it may,” Richards said. “Hmm. Vision Quest, I think, should head back to Landreich in company with Independence. Unless you think there’s anything else for you here, Captain Springweather?”

She shook her head. “You took care of the money. That was the important part. And I have the survey data from Nargrast. That could fetch a few credits on the minerals market. But if I stay here much longer I’ll be losing money hand over fist.”

“That would never do,” Richards said blandly. “By all means head for home with Independence next week. I’ll see to it that the Navy gives you a free maintenance overhaul when you put in at Landreich.”

Springweather smiled, an expression that always put Bondarevsky in mind of a cat studying a trapped bird.

“Next item…Captain Galbraith, I’m also requisitioning your marines.” Richards held up a hand to forestall the inevitable protest. “Same reasons as before, with some added points. The colonel and his men know this ship inside and out after their part in the early surveys. In addition, they have Nargrast experience, and we’ll still be conducting mineral extraction work there for some time to come. Once again, we need them here, and you’ll be able to pick up replacements at Landreich. Colonel? Any problems with that?”

Bhaktadil shook his turbaned head. “Not on my part, Admiral,” he said. “I think my boys and girls are getting used to things over here.” He looked more pleased than the reverse. Probably, Bondarevsky thought, he was looking forward to getting out from under Galbraith’s thumb. And he would be the ranking Marine officer aboard, commanding a double-sized contingent.

“Very good, then,” Richards said. “That clears my list. Now, who wants to talk about anything?”

“Sir?” Lieutenant Mario Vivaldi, the Communications Officer, put up a hand.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, Christmas is coming up, and some of us were wondering…”

Richards smiled. “I think I can safely say that we’ll be on a holiday watch rotation for Christmas, Lieutenant. Father Darby was already in to see me the other day to discuss religious observances. We’ve got a good cross-section of faiths represented in the Chaplain’s Office, so I’m pretty sure you’ll be well covered spiritually. Anything else you need, I’m sure we can provide.”

“If you want a tree, you’re welcome to try the ones on Nargrast,” Graham said with a grin. “Of course, they’ve got trunks as big around as this compartment and don’t reach as high as the overhead, and they give off fumes that smell like something died, but they’re green…sort of.”

“Pass,” Aengus Harper said.

“Any other questions before we get down to the regular business?” Richards asked. “No? Then the squadron officers are free to go, unless they want to sit around and listen to a lot of technical garbage. Mr. Clancy, I want you to go over the ideas you brought up last night concerning the improvements to the helm station. You’ve already got the thing cross-patched so many different ways I’m afraid to even think about powering up the engines, for fear of where we might land…”

And so the work went on.