The Nelson Touch

Chapter Fifteen

“Another boring system,” Admiral Stanley Shallcross said. “I’m starting to think we’re lost.”

Ted had to smile. They’d crossed through the tramline, every weapon and sensor primed for attack, only to discover that the new system was almost as useless as the previous system. The only moment of interest had come when they’d located a planet roughly the size of Luna, but a careful — if long-distance — investigation had revealed no trace of alien settlements. Ted had conceded, reluctantly, that the aliens only used the system as a transit point, if they used it as anything at all. But, with three tramlines going though the system, it was unlikely that they’d completely ignored it.

We’d picket the system if we had it, he thought, even if we didn’t settle the planet. Why didn’t the aliens picket the system?

He pushed the thought out of his head and concentrated on socialising. It wasn’t something he was very good at, even when he’d been a Captain; his career had been largely centred around Ark Royal and no one had ever invited him to any social events. Now, he found it hard to understand why they were even necessary, to the point Lopez had had to argue for hours before he’d reluctantly agreed to host the dinner. She’d pointed out, quite reasonably, that he should be meeting with his subordinates in informal session to help build up a rapport with them. And that it would be good for international relations.

“I don’t think we’re lost,” he said. “We just don’t know where we are.”

The American laughed and downed his glass of juice. Ted had been insistent on one thing; alcohol was not to be served, no matter the lax regulations when senior officers were concerned. So far, no one had complained, which was interesting. The last time he’d heard about a multinational gathering on a carrier, back before the war, a large amount of expensive alcohol had been drunk.

“But enough about the war,” Shallcross added. “We should talk about something else tonight.”

Ted looked across the compartment. Lieutenant Lopez had outdone herself, first in sourcing the food and drinks, then in arranging the decorations so the compartment looked both large enough to hold everyone while also being comfortable. Two-thirds of Ted’s subordinate commanding officers chatted away, learning more about their fellows with each word. Ted just wished he was as good at chatting to strangers as some of his subordinates. It was hard to hold a conversation with anyone new.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said, after a moment. He’d read the file the Americans had provided, but it had clearly been sanitized. “Why did you join the navy?”

“My father was a soldier from a family of soldiers,” Shallcross said. “So I joined the navy in teenage rebellion. I meant to go into the SEALS, but it turned out I had a knack for commanding starships and I was told it would be better if I stayed in the command track.”

Ted had to smile. “You don’t seem to have done badly,” he said. “Command of two carriers, then a battle squadron… that’s nothing to sniff at, is it?”

“I like to think so,” Shallcross said. “But my father still thinks I sit on the bridge, sipping my tea, while the groundpounders pound ground.”

Ted lifted an eyebrow. “Tea?”

“Apparently, naval officers are too effeminate to drink coffee,” Shallcross said. He shrugged, expressively. “My father was a very odd man. Went out to Washington as soon as we were all old enough to leave home, built a log cabin and settled in for the long haul. Last I heard, he was organising hunting and crossing swords with the elected mayor of the nearest community.”

“Better than my father,” Ted said. “He died when I was a child.”

He felt oddly morbid for a long moment. It had never really dawned on him until after he’d sobered up that he was now older than his father had been when he’d died. His father had had three kids and a moderately successful career. Ted’s career had stalled until his ship had suddenly become important again and he’d never married, or had children. It was something he’d never really wanted for himself.

But a drunkard wouldn’t make a good father, he reminded himself. And who would want to marry one?

“Looks like a disagreement over there,” Shallcross said, breaking into his thoughts. “You want to break it up?”

Ted followed his gaze. One of the American Captains was arm-wrestling the French Captain, with several other officers placing bets. It didn’t look as though they were in danger of actually hurting themselves, he decided, so he shook his head. Besides, everyone needed to blow off a little steam from time to time.

“Maybe not,” he said, finally. He wanted to run back to his quarters and hide. “But we should go talk to others.”

Shallcross nodded. “I’ll go speak to Captain Atsuko,” he said. “He does seem oddly timorous for a Japanese officer.”

“Maybe he’s just careful,” Ted said. He saw the French Captain getting up and smiled to himself. “I’ll go speak to Captain Bellerose.”

The French officer gave him a wide smile as he approached. “Admiral,” he said. His voice, oddly, seemed more accented than usual. “A glorious victory for the forces of France.”

“You won, then,” Ted said. “Well done.”

“Could have been worse,” Bellerose said. He grinned, suggesting he wasn’t entirely serious. “We were talking about pistols at dawn.”

Ted rolled his eyes. “And what happened, precisely?”

“We were having a discussion about the latest sports reports,” Bellerose said. “There were accusations of cheating. Everything went downhill from there.”

Ted sighed. He rarely bothered to follow sports, but he hadn’t been able to avoid hearing about the scandal. Several athletes had been accused of using illicit enhancement, manipulating a little-known loophole that forbade direct enhancement, but allowed pre-birth genetic modification. The scandal had rapidly become a criminal investigation after it had been suggested that the parents had been paid to have the children genetically enhanced, just so they could be recruited later by sporting clubs. He couldn’t recall the outcome, but there had been a lot of bad feeling at the time.

“Maybe better to forget about it out here,” he said. “We’re a long way from sporting matches.”

“True,” the Frenchman agreed. He produced a small bottle from his pocket, splashed some liquid into his fruit juice, then drank with obvious relish. “But it was a slur against our honour.”

“Stupid,” Ted said. “How are you coping with the exercises?”

“Pretty well, all things considered,” Bellerose said. “But we won’t really know until we encounter the aliens.”

Ted couldn’t disagree. They’d exercised constantly, but most of their exercises had been carried out in the simulator. There was simply too large a chance that the aliens had developed something new, something that would upset all their planning. Ted had worked through all the possibilities he and his crew could think of, but the aliens had invented too many surprises before for him to take the prospect lightly.

“But my ship and crew will fight in the best tradition,” Bellerose assured him. He gave Ted a wink. “Even if we do have to speak your barbaric tongue.”

Ted snorted. “English seems to have won the battle for supremacy,” he pointed out. “Is there a planet, apart from Earth, that doesn’t have just about everyone speak English?”

“It is a matter of some concern,” Bellerose said, quietly. “When will this cultural imperialism end?”

“Maybe we will all blur into one culture,” Ted said, after a moment. “Or maybe we will just start to separate out once again, now we have dozens of separate settled worlds.”

He looked down at the deck, remembering aspects of a very old debate. The troubles had resulted in the reassertion of a British identity, but how much of it was truly traditional and how much was idealised? Britannia itself had been careful to restrict settlement rights to people who were ethnically British, yet how could such barriers work when it was hard to define what made a Briton? How much of British society these days was actually derived from American cultural influence?

But he knew it was worse for Europe and the rest of the world. It had been America and Britain that had led the human race into space, particularly after the brief confrontation between Japan and the United States. English culture predominated outside Earth’s atmosphere; it was only since the first colonies had been established that different cultures had started to establish themselves away from Earth. And yet, how many of those cultures were still what they’d once been? It was impossible to give any precise answer.

Our culture works because it works, he thought. Poor maintenance had doomed quite a few asteroid settlements, where the cold equations of space overrode everything else. But other cultures might reassert themselves on a planet’s surface.

“Some of us do worry about what will happen on Earth,” Bellerose admitted. “When those who consider themselves true heirs go to space, what happens to the rest of the planet?”

Ted gave him a sharp look. Was that a reference to Prince Henry? Or was it a perfectly innocent comment that would have passed him by, if he hadn’t been worried about his royal crewman?

“I don’t know,” he said, carefully. “What do you mean?”

“A third of the planet’s surface is barbaric,” Bellerose commented. “The remainder has been forced to work together, while sending settlers to alien worlds. Will Earth slowly merge into one planetary government — or collapse into chaos? And, if there is one government, what happens to the colonies?”

“I think there’s no shortage of books or movies exploring that issue,” Ted said, after a moment. He’d watched quite a few movies about interstellar rebellions while he was a child, most of which — he knew now — were only worth watching for the actresses. Having a pretty girl lying on top of a tank while wearing nothing more than earrings made up for a lot. “But I don’t see humanity uniting any time soon.”

Bellerose smiled. “We’re not very good at that, are we?”

Ted shook his head. It was ironic, he knew, that most of the interstellar powers hadn’t trusted each other with mass drivers. If they had, the Battle of New Russia might not have been such a curbstomp. Now, of course, everyone and his grandmother was trying to build mass drivers and use them to defend Earth against the aliens. Afterwards… somehow, he doubted those weapons would go away.

“But we’re working on it,” he said. He caught sight of a pair of commanding officers who seemed to be getting closer to one another than he would have expected. “We’re working on it.”

He let Bellerose go to chat to one of the Americans, while he made his way over to the Chinese officer. Captain Wang Lei looked about as uncomfortable as Ted felt, standing in one corner of the room and holding a glass of clear water as though it was a weapon. Ted smiled at him and received a nod in return, then leaned against the bulkhead tiredly, trying to decide how best to open the discussion. Of all of the officers assigned to the task force, he knew least about Wang Lei. The Chinese Government hadn’t been very forthcoming about any of its officers.

“Your crews did well in the last exercise,” he said, figuring it was as good a way as any to start. “You saved two carriers from certain destruction.”

“At the cost of four of our ships,” Wang Lei said. His voice was flat, utterly emotionless. “I don’t count that a victory.”

Ted had to admit he agreed. Standard tactical doctrine insisted that frigates, which could be built in vast numbers relatively quickly, were expendable, certainly when compared to the expensive carriers. Indeed, given the existence of mass drivers, tacticians had been questioning the viability of carriers long before the aliens had arrived to hammer the point home. But frigates couldn’t handle every mission themselves, while starfighters simply couldn’t operate far from their bases. The carriers were both desperately needed and white elephants.

“But you did well,” he said, softly. “If you do as well as that when the time comes to fight, I will be pleased.”

Wang Lei, for the first time, showed a hint of emotion. “The government will disagree,” he said. “Losing ships in combat is not considered a good thing.”

Ted winced. The Chinese Government was completely impenetrable to outsiders — the précis he’d read hadn’t been able to decide if it was a dictatorship, a single-party state or a semi-democracy — but it definitely had one thing in common with the British Government. Losing a starship, no matter the situation, was something that had to be investigated thoroughly, just to make sure the commanding officer wasn’t at fault. He’d answered quite enough questions about the lost frigates during their last mission to know that such an experience could be unendurable.

“Losing the whole fleet would be worse,” Ted said. “But governments can be very unreasonable at times.”

The thought made him roll his eyes. He hadn’t been involved in the negotiations, but he’d heard there had been some real disagreements over the rules of engagement as well as the fleet’s command structure. If the Royal Navy had been bigger — much bigger — it would have been very tempting to insist that only British ships were dispatched to attack the aliens. But then, he understood the other problem too. Losing ships was bad enough, but losing them under someone else’s command was worse. No wonder the Chinese had been reluctant to commit a carrier to the fleet.

“They can,” the Chinese officer agreed. He smiled, suddenly. “But what do you think of the war?”

Ted hesitated, then did his best to answer. “I think we have to win, or at least force them to talk to us,” he said. “They certainly should be able to talk to us.”

Wang Lei shrugged. “I once had to spend time in Bahrain as part of a liaison mission,” he said. “They were dependent on us for their protection, yet their treatment of us seemed unaccountably rude until we realised that they were honouring their customs, rather than our own. Holding long dinners, never raising serious topics, seeking consensus on how best to proceed… it was how they acted, rather than us. Sometimes they lied to our faces because they wanted to save their own face.”

He smiled, rather dryly. “Perhaps, for all we know, the aliens need to be hammered before they will talk to us.”

“Perhaps,” Ted agreed.

Wang Lei nodded towards the Japanese officer. “In both of the wars between Japan and America, the Japanese had to have their faces ground in their defeat before they surrendered,” he said. “They had to have their defeat made very clear to them. The aliens might be the same.”

It sounded possible, Ted had to admit. But, at the same time, how could a race reach interstellar space with an attitude that made it impossible to accept defeat until it was pushed right to the brink of extinction? Japan’s casualties towards the end of the Second World War, both civilian and military, had been horrific, utterly beyond his comprehension. If the Americans had had to invade, as well as dropping additional nukes and perhaps even bioweapons, the survival of the Japanese as a people would have been in doubt. Their entire culture would have been destroyed beyond repair.

The Chinese officer leaned forward. “Humanity has several different ways of looking at warfare,” he added. “For all we know, a starship commanded by a rogue officer fired on an alien ship and started the war.”

“Babylon 5,” Ted recognised. British intelligence officers had dug through countless novels, movies and television programs, looking for ideas. Some of them had even proved workable in real life. “Or perhaps it was Doctor Who.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wang Lei said. “The aliens might well be so completely alien that we cannot understand why they’re so angry at us. In that case, all we can do is fight until the threat has been destroyed. And everything else simply doesn’t matter.”

“I know,” Ted said.

He nodded politely to Wang Lei, then stepped away from him, feeling an odd moment of pity as another Chinese officer made a beeline towards Wang Lei. The woman was pretty enough, in an odd kind of way, but it was clear she was his supervisor, even though she was formally his subordinate. A political commissioner… Ted shook his head, tiredly. Even during the worst of the troubles, when the very survival of Britain had been called into question, there had never been any political commissioners. But the Chinese had kept the very old custom.

How, he asked himself, can anyone command when someone else is looking over his shoulder?

He could see, he supposed, the need to keep an eye on the officer’s political leanings. But how could they trust an untrained officer with the authority to override the Captain’s decision at the worst possible time? It was madness!

“Admiral,” Captain Fitzwilliam said. “I trust you are enjoying the party?”

Ted glowered at him. Fitzwilliam seemed to be handling himself perfectly, chatting to everyone and trying to make sure that no one was left out. It was part and parcel of growing up as an aristocrat… he sighed, then shook his head, wishing for a drink. He wasn’t cut out to be a sociable commander.

“I wonder if it’s too late to rule by fear,” he muttered, just loudly enough for Fitzwilliam to hear. “I am no good at these events.”

Fitzwilliam nodded. Ted eyed him, sharply.

“My brother was just the same once,” he said. “Mother used to make him go anyway, just to force him to get over it. And it worked. Besides, it’s just another form of combat.”

“Without the danger of getting blown up,” Ted said. “I could really get to dislike it.”

“Diplomacy,” Fitzwilliam said. “It’s important to make others feel appreciated.”