Once a Hero

Chapter Nine

She was trying to think whom to consult, when she remembered that she needed to make an appointment to meet Admiral Dossignal. Now, while she was working her way through the basic level training cubes, would be an ideal time. She contacted Commander Atarin’s clerk, and an hour or so later the message came back that the admiral would see her at 1330. So at 1315, she presented herself at the admiral’s office suite, where Commander Atarin happened to be delivering a pile of cubes.

“How’s Hull and Architecture, Lieutenant?”

“Very interesting, sir. Major Pitak has me taking some courses, since I had no background.”

“Good; she’s very thorough. Has she given you the ship test yet?”

“That came first, sir.”

“Ah.” His eyebrows rose and fell. “Well, you must have passed, or I’d have heard about it. Good for you. How are you getting along in the junior mess? Settling in all right?”

“Fine, sir,” Esmay said.

“This ship’s so big, none of us can get to know everyone. Sometimes people coming in from smaller craft find that very unsettling. If you have any special interests, you might take a look at the recreational group roster. We encourage people to have acquaintances outside their own work sections—even commands.”

“Well, sir, the juniors’ tactics discussion group did ask me to speak on the Xavier action.”

“Oh? Well, that’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s a start. And they showed some initiative in asking . . . who was it?”

“Ensign Dettin, sir.”

“Mmm . . . I don’t know Dettin. But I’m sure they’ve all heard something about Xavier, and are curious to know more. I might drop in . . .” Was that a threat, or a warning, or mere interest? “Ah—the admiral’s ready.”

Admiral Dossignal was a tall man with craggy features and big-knuckled hands that fiddled with things on his desk. Despite this, he seemed more relaxed than Captain Hakin, and considerably more welcoming.

“I’ve read the notations your Board made in your file, Lieutenant Suiza . . . and though I can understand their concern about your decisions, I do not share them. I have complete confidence in your loyalty to the Familias Regnant.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No thanks necessary, Lieutenant. Although we need to smoke out the other traitors we surely have—Garrivay and his cohorts cannot be all of them—we must have trust, or we have no cohesion.” He paused, but Esmay found nothing to say. When he resumed, it was in a different tone, less somber. “I understand you and Major Pitak are getting on well . . . and Commander Seveche?”

“I’ve only met him, sir,” Esmay said. The head of Hull and Architecture had spoken to her only briefly; he had seemed even busier than Major Pitak when she saw him.

“I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but I must say it’s unusual to have a lieutenant assigned here without having gone through one of the advanced technical schools first. You may find it necessary to take some courses . . .”

“I’m already signed up for one, sir.”

“Good. By your record, you’re a quick learner, but heavy maintenance is a lifetime’s study.” He glanced back at his desk display. “I see you’ve had recent home planet leave. How did your family react to all the publicity?”

Esmay tried to think of a tactful way to phrase it. “They . . . went overboard, sir.”

“Ah? Oh, I suppose you mean the medal?”

Of course it was already in her file; she knew that. “Yes, sir.”

“But that was the government, not your family . . . You have . . . a father, stepmother, half-brothers?”

“Yes, sir. Also aunts, uncles, cousins . . . it’s a large clan, sir.”

“Did they approve of your joining us?” The warm brown eyes sharpened.

“Not . . . entirely, sir. Not at first. Now they do.”

“We have no other officers from your planet, you see. The last was some thirty years ago.”

“Meluch Zalosi, yes, sir.” A Zalosi of the Coarchy, which no longer existed, but had been, at one time, a political force. The Zalosi, though, were servants of the Coarchs. Meluch, the gossip went, had been the illegitimate child of the Tributine Coarch and a Zalosi guard, farmed out to a distant Zalosi relative. He had proven to carry the distinctive feathery brows of the Coarch’s line—a dominant trait—and when he qualified for the Fleet entrance exams it had seemed the best solution to everyone. Meluch himself had not been asked; he was a Zalosi, to go where the Coarchy directed.

“I wondered,” Admiral Dossignal went on, breaking into her musings, “why so few? Altiplano is, I understand, an agricultural world. We usually get quite a few recruits from ag worlds.”

“It’s not the usual sort of ag world, sir.” Esmay paused, wondering how much to explain. The admiral would have ample data available if he really wanted it.

“And why is that?” he asked. Perhaps he simply wanted her analysis, rather than the raw data.

“No free-birthers,” Esmay said succinctly. All the other reasons came back to that: with population growth under control, there were no idle hands to ship offplanet. Immigrants had to agree before they were accepted; if they already had reproduced, they had to agree to pre-emptive sterilization.

“But your family—how many sibs do you have?”

“Two, sir. But they’re my father’s second wife’s, on her permits.” She did not mention what he could probably guess, that the birth limits were enforced more strictly on other families. Her father could have sired more children, but he had transferred his remaining permits to Sanni, who wanted them.

“I . . . see. And their attitude towards rejuvenation?”

She hesitated. “I . . . know only my father’s view, and my uncle’s. They expressed concern about the effect on population stability, although the competitive value of ever-increasing experience would have a positive effect.”

“Mmm. So the senior military personnel on Altiplano have not been rejuved?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you sense any resentment of the Familias on that basis?”

Esmay felt uncomfortable, but answered with the truth as she saw it. “No, sir, none. Altiplano’s an independent; the admiral is no doubt aware that we have no sponsor with a Seat in Council, and Council policy affects us only inasmuch as it affects commercial law.”

“There’s been some unrest, especially since the revelation about that mess on Patchcock,” the admiral said. “There’s now a strong political faction opposed to rejuvenation on the grounds that the rich old will exploit the poor unable to afford rejuvenation.”

“I don’t think anyone on Altiplano feels exploited by the Familias,” Esmay said. “Occasionally by each other . . .” More than occasionally, but she didn’t see how her limited knowledge of Altiplanan local politics would make the situation clear. She didn’t say the first thought that popped into her head, which was that any force trying to exploit Altiplano would have its work cut out for it.

“I’m glad to hear it,” the admiral said. “I’ll be seeing you from time to time—officers of the 14th get together regularly . . . Commander Atarin will let you know the next event.”

“Yes, sir; thank you.”

The first thing Esmay did after coming back from her interview with the admiral was pull a diagram of the various commands aboard the DSR. She had thought she understood how the chains of command ran, and who reported to whom about what . . . but several things the admiral had said left her confused.

A few hours later, she was only slightly less confused, but considerably entertained. With very few exceptions—and DSRs were the primary exception—Fleet vessels had a simple command structure, with the captain at the top, and authority descending rank by rank through the officers to the enlisted personnel. An admiral aboard a flagship had no direct authority over the ship’s crew: all orders had to flow through the regular captain.

But the size of the newer DSRs had tempted Fleet to treat them as mobile bases. Rather than maintain separate technical schools and laboratory facilities at Sector HQ, staff had decided to put them aboard the Koskiusko, which needed most of the equipment anyway. Thus the Koskiusko had multiple commands, each headed by an admiral, which were expected to use the same facilities—and even the same experts—for different purposes. If Fleet had wanted to create a venue for massive turf battles, it could have invented no better arrangement.

Esmay found the debris of such battles in the files. The Special Materials Fabrication Facility, for instance: it was supposed to serve the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard by making all the materials needed to maintain an inventory of structural members. But it also served the Senior Technical Schools, where students learned to make such materials, and the Special Materials Research Lab, where the most inventive materials scientists struggled to develop new materials with exotic properties.

On the first deployment a massive fight developed between the 14th Heavy Maintenance, which wanted a larger inventory of the crystal-bonded structural members for repair, and the other two commands, which insisted that they needed a guaranteed minimum access to the facility to fulfill their missions.

That argument had risen through the various chains of command until the admirals involved were, as Pitak put it, “locked in a room to fight it out until only one emerged victorious.” The solution—a compromise reached with all admirals still alive and kicking vigorously—satisfied no one, but its inconvenience suggested that complaint would only make things worse.

Even the traditional division between the ship’s crew and its passengers had eroded. Though in theory Captain Hakin had the ultimate authority for the ship’s security and functioning, his crew was outnumbered many times by the personnel of the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard. When a previous Yard commander wanted to run an “outrigger tube” between T-3 and T-4, between the lateral docking bays, he’d done so. Esmay found the furious correspondence launched by the then captain to the admiral then commanding the 14th Heavy Maintenance, and the directive from Sector HQ that the offending tube would be allowed to remain. The captain had been reassigned.

No wonder the ship’s architecture didn’t match the computer specs, and everyone needed update cubes to keep track of the changes!

Above the ship level, the chain of command looked more like a tree diagram. Captain Hakin’s superior was Admiral Gourache, commander of this wave, whose superior was the Sector 14 commandant, Admiral Foxworth. Admiral Dossignal, however, reported directly to the sector commandant; he was responsible for all maintenance functions in the sector. Admiral Livadhi was Training Command’s representative in this sector, and not under the sector commander at all: Fleet Headquarters had taken over all training functions sixty years before. Similarly, the medical command had its own separate chain, this time running back to Admiral Surgeon General Boussy, back at Rockhouse.

Her father would never have put up with this mess. On Altiplano, the military medical service was firmly and formally subordinate to the operational command. Yes, and that’s how he was able to conceal your trauma, her memory prompted. No one was going to argue with the hero of the war . . . .

That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t even sure it had been a military hospital. She wasn’t going to think about it anyway. She put the displays away; she understood the command structure well enough now. She could start preparing for her presentation to the discussion group in two days.

The Koskiusko had a personnel complement the size of a small city or large orbital station, and the officer list alone was as large as the crew of any normal ship. Esmay knew that, in the intellectual sense, but when she saw the mass of ensigns jamming the lecture hall and crowding the passage outside, numbers became experience.

“You’re not all in the tactics discussion group, surely,” she said to Ensign Dettin, who had offered to introduce her.

“No, sir. But a lot of others wanted to come—I’ll have to shift some of them out, because they’re overloading the compartment . . .” She could see that. All the seats had been taken long ago; ensigns were crowded knee to knee in front, and were sitting squashed together in the aisles and in back. They were jamming the passage outside, too.

She watched Dettin trying to shoo them back out, to no avail. She should, she realized, have told someone more senior about this . . . if she’d thought it would be more than a dozen or so ensigns, she would have. Dettin wasn’t getting anywhere, and it was her responsibility. She reached for the microphone. “Excuse me,” she said. Silence fell, chopping off words in mid-utterance. “How many of you are regular members of the tactics discussion group?”

A few hands went up, about what she’d expected originally.

“This meeting was scheduled for that group,” Esmay said. “We can’t have a mob scene like this; it’s not safe. Those of you who are not members of the discussion group will have to leave, until we’re sure we have seating for that group, and then we’ll see how many others we can accommodate.”

Low mutters of protest, but these were ensigns and she was a full lieutenant now. Squirming awkwardly, those crammed into the aisles began to stand up; those in front waited, perhaps hoping for a reprieve, but Esmay gave them a stern look. Slowly, more awkwardly than necessary, they heaved themselves up and shuffled out. She could hear raised voices from the passage, but first things first. Some of those in seats were now standing; some sat as if glued in place. She hoped those were all discussion group members.

“Ensign Dettin.” He looked mildly embarrassed. “Make sure all the discussion group have seats—you know them all, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When they’re seated, and if it’s agreeable to the others, I don’t mind having any spare seats filled. But that’s all.”

“Sir.” He glanced around, his lips moving as he ran down some internal list. “All here but two—they may be outside.”

“Go check on them. By name.”

He made his way up the crowded aisle and called out into the passage. A knot of ensigns congealed in the opening, and finally two more elbowed their way in. That left seats for another two dozen, Esmay figured. She wished she knew a fair way to allocate those seats, but it was too late for that. More quickly than they’d left, more ensigns came in until all seats were filled.

Dettin introduced her, excitement edging his voice. The lights dimmed, except where she stood. The eager young faces faded into a blur with highlights of eyes and teeth. She had not expected that, but after standing in the glare of flag officers’ disapproval, she was not about to crumple in a merely visual spotlight.

She had prepared a display cube with the same information given in court: the geometry of the Xavier system, the disposition of Fleet vessels, available Xavieran and civilian vessels, the number and armament of the invaders. She had been over this so many times, for her counsel and for Board of Inquiry and for the court-martial, that she could have explained in her sleep just how outnumbered Serrano had been even before Hearne defected.

When she put up the first display, a faint sigh came from her audience. Breathless silence while she spoke, reciting the familiar sequence. Some of it she knew only by report, and she said that. But the events themselves were so compelling that no one seemed to mind: the Benignity intrusion, the lagging pair of Benignity ships . . . possibly a new tactic, possibly malfunction. No one knew for sure. The successful attack on those ships, the damage to one assault carrier, the effective ambush of the killer-scout sent to form its own ambush. The long and dangerous harrying of the invaders in their course to Xavier, the loss of the space station, the damage to the Xavieran cities.

“Only a scorch, after all,” she heard someone mutter. She stopped short; silence returned, thick and tense. She could not see, against the glare of light focussed on her, who had spoken.

“Only a scorch . . . someone thinks a scorch is a minor problem? Let me show you video . . .” She switched to that, the former capital of Xavier on one side of the screen, as it had been, a small city of wide streets and low stone buildings, gardens and tree-shaded parks. That was file footage from Fleet databanks; Xavier’s own records had all been destroyed.

On the half screen, an uneven field of rubble, the shattered remains of trees, the languid columns of smoke twisting in their own heat, a damage assessment team from Fleet in their protective gear. The video pickup had zoomed in on dead bodies, human and animal. Esmay recognized a dead horse, if no one else did. “All population centers,” Esmay said, “were reduced like this. Fire destroyed outlying settlements, as well as millions of hectares of pasture and farm crops. A ‘scorch’ is intended to leave the planet barely habitable for the Benignity’s own troops, with return to agricultural production in three to five years. That doesn’t leave much for the people who live there.”

“But weren’t they all killed?” someone asked.

“No, thanks to the foresight of Commander Serrano and their own government. Most of the population survived in remote regions—they have caves, I heard—but their economic base is gone. It will take a generation or two just to recover what they lost.” She could imagine the sequence; Altiplano had suffered similar damage during the Succession Wars when their Founder had died. The years of hunger, while they reestablished their agricultural base. The years after that when just enough to eat was no longer enough. As distant as they were, they could not expect much help from the rest of the Familias, once some new crisis caught public attention.

Silence again, this time with a different flavor.

“Let’s begin with the situation as it first appeared to Commander Serrano.” Esmay changed displays, to show the Xavier system again. “Xavier had been troubled by periodic incursions over the past few years, that appeared to be independent raiders of some sort. These had threatened the orbital station, and in fact had damaged it on more than one occasion. Xavier’s defense consisted of outmoded, under-supported Demoiselle-class ships, of which only one was really space-worthy by the present. The others had been cannibalized for parts to keep that one working. Xavier is off regular passenger service, and ships out its agricultural products—mostly large-animal semen, ova, and frozen embryos—aboard locally-owned private vessels. Nearly all its mining production is used locally, for building up the infrastructure.”

Esmay had not known any of this until she read Heris Serrano’s brief—concise, but hardly brief in the usual terms—to the admiral. She had found it easy to follow, because Altiplano and Xavier had many similarities.

“The government enlisted Commander Serrano, then acting as a civilian captain of a private yacht—but a very well-armed one—in defense against just such a raider. As you might expect—” she allowed herself a brief smile “—the unsuspecting raider didn’t have a chance.”

“How big was it?” came from the back of the room.

“According to scan reports at the time, it was an Aethar’s World raider—” Esmay flashed the hull specifications on the display. “Commander Serrano anticipated its attack course, and was able to surprise it.”

“But that wasn’t the whole battle, was it? One lousy little raider?”

“No, of course not.” Esmay changed displays again, to show the location of Xavier relative to Benignity and Familias territory. “Commander Serrano’s scan techs noticed another ship in system, which appeared to be an observer . . . she suspected that the raider’s attack was merely a probe for a larger invasion force. She transmitted that concern to the nearest Fleet headquarters.”

“And got a bunch of traitors,” came a mutter from midway back.

“Not a ‘bunch,’ ” Esmay said. “Most of the officers and crew of all three ships were loyal, or things would have turned out very differently. Fleet dispatched a small force, under the command of Dekan Garrivay. Two patrol ships, one cruiser. The captains of all three ships were prepared to cooperate with the Benignity, but that is not true of others.”

“Exactly how many traitors were there, and how do we know they were all discovered?”

“I don’t know the answer to either question,” Esmay said. “Some died fairly quickly—it’s impossible to determine their alliance. And it’s possible—though unlikely—that some traitors did not reveal themselves during the fighting on each ship. The last estimate I saw was that five to ten percent of each crew was actually traitorous—that includes both officers and enlisted.”

She watched the sideways looks, as the young officers estimated how many of the people in the room that would be.

“Naturally, most of them were in fairly senior, critical posts. Five traitorous ensigns wouldn’t do the enemy as much good as one captain and the senior scan tech. The problem for the Benignity, as I understand it, is that the sort of thing they planned at Xavier required their long-standing agents to identify themselves to each other—a very risky affair. This need to confer was their undoing.”

Esmay skipped rapidly past the still-classified methods by which Koutsoudas had overheard the conspirators in the midst of their plotting.

“Commander Serrano had to prevent Garrivay from destroying Xavier’s orbital station, and she needed those ships to defend from the expected invasion. That meant she had to relieve Garrivay and the other traitorous captain of their commands, identify any other traitors, and rally the loyal crews.”

“Well, but she’s Admiral Serrano’s niece,” someone said. “She could just say so—”

Esmay almost grinned. Had she ever been that naive, even before she went into Fleet?

“Commander Serrano, remember, was operating as a civilian, whose resignation from Fleet had been highly publicized. There is some evidence that Commander Garrivay worried about what she might do, especially the influence she might have on the Xavieran government. He was trying to discredit her there. But consider: you are a civilian—at least apparently civilian—and you are on a space station where two Fleet vessels are docked. Another one is on picket at a distance. How are you going to gain access to the docked ships? We don’t let civilians just wander in. And once in, how are you going to convince an ignorant crew that their captain is a traitor, and you should be allowed to take over? Would you, for instance, readily believe that your captain was a traitor, just because someone told you so?”

She saw comprehension of the difficulties on most faces.

“I didn’t,” she said, fighting down the tension of that confession. “All I knew of the situation—as a jig on Despite, under Kiansa Hearne—was that we were on patrol, while the rest of the group was docked. I knew nothing about an invasion; we thought we had come to Xavier to babysit some paranoid colonists who had panicked over a perfectly ordinary random raid. A lot of us were annoyed that we’d missed the chance to compete in the annual Sector war games . . . we felt our gunnery was outstanding.”

“But surely you suspected—”

Esmay snorted. “Suspected? Listen—my real concern was stuff disappearing out of personnel lockers. Minor theft. I didn’t worry about the captain . . . the captain was the captain, doing her job of commanding the ship. I was a mere jig, doing my assigned job, which was servicing the automatic internal scanners and trying to find out who was getting into the lockers, and how. When the . . . mutiny started on Despite, I was so surprised I nearly got shot before I caught on.” She waited for the nervous giggles to die down.

“Yeah—like that. It was ridiculous . . . I couldn’t believe it. Nor could most of us. That’s why conspirators are always a step ahead of the people who get real work done . . . they can count on that surprise.”

“But how did Serrano get command?” someone asked.

“I can only tell you what I heard,” Esmay said. “Apparently, she and some of her former crew got aboard by some ruse, asked to talk to Garrivay in his office. By good fortune—or perhaps she had some way of knowing—some of the other conspirators were there. She and her crew . . . killed them.”

“Right away? You mean they didn’t try to talk them out of it?”

Esmay let that lie in a stillness that was as scornful as her own. When the stirring began, she ended it by speaking. “When someone has determined on treason—is commanding a ship, and planning to deliver helpless civilians to the enemy—I doubt any moral homilies would change his mind. Commander Serrano made a command decision; she eliminated the most senior conspirators as quickly as possible. Even then it wasn’t easy.”

Esmay put up new displays. “Now—Captain Hearne took Despite—with me, and the rest of the crew—quickly out of Xavier system. Our exec was also involved, but the next junior officer was both loyal, and on the bridge to hear Commander Serrano’s transmission to Captain Hearne, requesting her return to station and her assistance in defending Xavier. He actually began the mutiny, appealing to the bridge crew . . .” She stopped, flooded in memories of the next few hours. The contradictory orders on the ship’s internal communications, the total confusion, the time it took—which now seemed inexplicable—for the loyalists to realize that a mutiny was necessary, and that they’d have to use deadly force on their crewmates.

“From the tactical point of view,” she said, forcing all that back down, “Commander Serrano faced a very difficult task. The Benignity force arrived almost simultaneously with her assumption of command. Had she waited even a few more hours, it would have been impossible. The Benignity force—” Esmay outlined its specifications, reminding her audience of the usual tactics used by Benignity strike forces. Now, describing decisions and actions she had not personally witnessed, she found it easier to be calm and logical. This ship here, these over there, expected and unexpected choices of maneuver . . . results, neatly tabulated without reference to the people whose lives had just been changed forever.

All too soon, she had to come back to her own experience. She skipped over the internal battle for control of Despite. She had relived that too many times for the court to do it again, for these callow youngsters. But they needed to know how the battle ended, including the mistakes she had made.

“We came in too fast,” she said, displaying yet another visual. “My concern was that we might arrive too late, and I assumed that any insertion barrage would be sufficiently dispersed. As you know, calculation of real elapsed time in multiple FTL hops is difficult at best—but the error is usually negative, not positive. As it happened, we made it through insertion safely, and skip-jumped to here—” she pointed. “Without dumping enough residual vee. We were short-crewed, with some damage to the nav computers, so I couldn’t get a quick solution to a microjump that would have allowed the right angular motion. So . . . we blew past Xavier, and in that interim Paradox took fatal damage.” More than eighteen hundred dead. Her fault. War left no margin for mistakes. She remembered the desperate scramble on the bridge of her ship, the bridge crew fighting to get control, to get a jump solution that would let them get back in time to do some good.

“We got a jump solution,” she said, leaving out the rest of it, that instant when she had to accept it, with the risk, or not. The risk had been substantial—the confidence interval on that very unorthodox jump was broad enough that they could have gone right into Xavier itself. “And we came out of jump with a clear shot up the rear of the Benignity command cruiser.” And a vector that gave them only one chance for that shot. The crew that had resented losing a chance to become the Sector gunnery champions had made their shot in the narrow window . . . and then had managed to reposition Despite in a stable orbit.

“The Board of Inquiry,” Esmay said, “did not approve of the means, though they liked the results.” She didn’t want to discuss that; she hurried on to show how the Xavieran defenses had contributed: the suicidal use of phase cannon on a shuttle, the improvised mines, little Grogon’s few telling shots, the yacht’s astonishing defeat of the killer-ship.

“Only because they weren’t expected,” Esmay pointed out. “The Benignity ship intended ambush—post-battle analysis picked up enough transmissions to know that—and simply didn’t know the yacht was there. When it shut down active systems to lie low for several hours, it was an easy target.”

“What difference would it have made if Despite had also been in the Xavier system the whole time?”

An intelligent question, but difficult. “By the ship stats, it would have improved the odds ratio only about fifteen percent. To my own knowledge, Despite had the best weapons performance in the Sector: whatever Hearne’s failings, she demanded and got quick and accurate fire from her crew. But if it had stayed, it would have been a known quantity, and Commander Serrano’s force would still have been outnumbered and outgunned. I haven’t seen any of the senior analysts’ reports, but my own guess is that its contribution throughout the long battle would have been less than its effectiveness as an unexpected opponent at the end. That is, however, only my guess—it does not change the fact that the lack of another hull severely limited Commander Serrano’s choices of action—and that its absence was the result of treason.”

Silence, attentive and almost breathless. Esmay waited. Finally someone shifted, a very audible rasp of clothing against the seat cushions, and that broke their immobility. Ensign Dettin clambered up to take the podium, and thank her for her talk. Hands rose for more questions, but Esmay caught sight of senior rank in the rear. When had they come in? She hadn’t noticed . . . but certainly no ensign guarding the door from other ensigns would refuse entry to the handful of majors and lieutenant commanders gathered there.

Dettin saw them, finally, and stopped short in his closing remarks. “Uh . . . sir . . . ?”

Commander Atarin, Esmay finally recognized as he moved out of the dimness back there and into the light. “I presume you’d be willing to give the same briefing to senior officers?”

A shiver of apprehension ran down her backbone. She couldn’t tell if he was angry, or amused; she didn’t know whether to apologize or explain. Both were bad ideas, her family heritage reminded her. “Of course, sir.” She choked back the automatic qualifiers: if she wasn’t really qualified, why was she showing off to the ensigns?

“If I could have a word . . .” he murmured, his glance raking the ensigns, who immediately began scrambling from their seats to leave by the other entrance.

“Of course, sir.” Esmay retrieved her display cube from the projector, and came down from the dais. Major Pitak was not one of the officers there, and she didn’t recognize any of the others besides Atarin. They gazed at the departing ensigns with the kind of neutral expression which she interpreted as trouble on the half-shell and bubbling from the broiler. Atarin said nothing more until the ensigns had gone.

“Very clearly explained, I thought,” he said then. Esmay did not relax; from his tone he might have been discussing a textbook, and she wasn’t sure whether she was being considered the textbook’s author or its topic. “I was impressed with your analysis of your own errors.”

Textbook case of junior officer putting feet clumsily in mouth, then.

“Just how badly was that nav computer damaged?”

A factual question she could answer. “It had taken direct fire—we’d replaced components from storage, but we couldn’t get the microjump functions within 80 percent of normal function.”

One of the other officers spoke up. “Couldn’t you have used components from the weapons board? There’s duplication in some of that, if I recall. ”

“Yes, sir, there is. But we didn’t want to risk having any delay in target acquisition or getting a firing solution.”

“Umm. So you were skip-jumping with a faulty system . . . a bit risky, wasn’t it?”

Esmay could think of no real answer but a shrug; one did not offer shrugs. “Somewhat risky, yes sir.” It had been terrifying at the time, as the confidence intervals broadened and she had had to feel her way from one jump to the next. Instinct, she had been well taught, made a lousy guide to navigation in space.

“When I read the Board of Inquiry report,” Atarin said, “I didn’t notice that they acknowledged the difficulty with the nav computer. I presume you mentioned it.”

“It was in the record, sir,” Esmay said. She had not dwelt on the difficulties it presented; it would have been whining, making excuses.

“Yes. Well, Lieutenant Suiza, I think you’d better expect an invitation to the senior tactics discussion group. I quite realize that you aren’t a senior analyst—but I doubt we can resist having a firsthand account of so . . . striking . . . an engagement.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you might want to check the orientation of your illustration eight . . . I think you’ve got the axes rotated ninety degrees . . . unless there was a reason for that.”

“Yes, sir.”

With a nod, Atarin led the other officers out. Esmay felt like falling into one of the seats and shaking for a half hour, but Dettin was peeking in at her, obviously hoping to chat.

“So you don’t think she’s rousing the ensigns to any sort of . . . undesirable activity?”

“No, sir. You know how ensigns are: they’ll go after anyone with real experience to talk about. They love gory stories, and that’s what they were hoping for. Instead, she gave them a perfectly straightforward account, as unexciting as possible, of an innately thrilling engagement. Absolutely no self-puffery at all, and no attempt to romanticize Commander Serrano, either. I’ve invited her to address the senior tactics discussion group—she’ll get more intelligent questions there, but I suspect she’ll answer them as well.”

“I don’t want to make her into some sort of hero,” Admiral Dossignal said. “It will rile our touchy captain. Too much attention—”

“Sir, with all due respect, she is a hero. She has not sought attention; from her record she never did. But she saved Serrano’s ship—and Xavier—and we can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Letting her discuss it in professional terms is the best way to ensure that it doesn’t become an unprofessional topic.”

“I suppose. When is she speaking? I’d like to be there.”

“The meeting after next. We have that continuing education required lecture next time.”

When Esmay reported to duty the next day, Major Pitak said, “I hear you had an interesting evening. How does it feel to have an overflow audience? Ever thought of being an entertainer?”

The nightmares that had kept her awake most of the night put an edge in Esmay’s voice. “I wish they hadn’t asked me!” Pitak’s eyebrows rose. “Sorry,” Esmay said. “I just . . . would rather put it behind me.”

Pitak grinned sourly. “Oh, it’s behind you, all right—just as a thruster’s behind a pod, pushing it ever onward. Face it, Suiza, you’re not going to be an anonymous member of the pack ever again.”

Just like my father, Esmay thought. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Listen to me,” Pitak said. “You don’t have to convince me that you’re not a glory-hound. I doubt anyone who’s ever served with you or commanded you thinks you’re a glory-hound. But it’s like anything else—if you stand in the rain, you get wet, and if you do something spectacular, you get noticed. Face it. Deal with it. And by the way, did you finish with that cube on hull specs of minesweepers?”

“Yes, sir,” Esmay said, handing it over, and hoping the topic had turned for good.

“I hear you’re on the schedule for the senior tactics discussion group,” Pitak said. Esmay managed not to sigh or groan. “If you’ve got any data on the hull damage to Serrano’s ship, I’d like to hear about it. Also the Benignity assault carrier that blew in orbit . . . mines, I think it was . . . it would be helpful to know a little more about that. The mines and the hull both. I realize you weren’t in the system for long afterwards, but perhaps . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not that it’s tactics proper, but data inform tactics, or should. I expect Commander Serrano made use of everything she knew about H&A.”

Forewarned by this exchange, Esmay was not surprised to be buttonholed by other senior officers in the days that followed. Each suggested particular areas she might want to cover in her talk, pertaining to that officer’s specialty. She delved into the ship’s databanks in every spare moment, trying to find answers, and anticipate other questions. Amazing how connected everything was . . . she had known the obvious for years, how the relative mass of Benignity and Fleet ships governed their chosen modes of action, but she’d never noticed how every detail, every subsystem, served the same aims.

Even recruitment policy, which she had not really thought of as related to tactics at all. If you threw massive ships in large numbers into an offensive war, seeking conquest, you expected heavy losses . . . and needed large numbers of troops, both space and surface. Widespread conscription, especially from the long-conquered worlds, met that need for loyal soldiers. Recent conquests supplied a conscripted civilian work force for low-level, labor-intensive industries. A force primarily defensive, like the Familias Regular Space Service, manning smaller ships with more bells and whistles, preserved its civilian economic base by not removing too many young workers into the military. Hence hereditary military families who did not directly enter the political hierarchy.

Fascinating, once she thought about it this way. She couldn’t help thinking what widespread rejuvenation would do to this structure, stable over the past hundred or more years. Then she surprised herself when she anticipated the next set of hull specs on Benignity killer-escorts . . . on their choice of hull thickness for assault carriers. How had she known? Her father’s brusque You’re a Suiza! overrode the automatic thought that she must have seen it before somewhere, she couldn’t possibly be smart enough to guess right.

By the time of her second presentation, she felt stuffed with new knowledge barely digested. She’d checked her illustrative displays (yes, number eight had been rotated ninety degrees from the standard references) and assembled what she hoped were enough background references.