SLNS Québec
Dzung System
Solarian League
“Well, Sir, all I can say is that it’s about frigging time,” Captain Gabriella Timberlake growled, standing at Admiral Vincent Capriotti’s shoulder as they gazed at the latest dispatch on Capriotti’s display. The fact that the Dzung System was just under seventy light-years from Sol meant Task Force 783 had gotten the new general order sooner than most of the rest of the Solarian League Navy, and Capriotti wondered how the Navy’s other flag officers were going to react to them.
For that matter, he wasn’t entirely certain how he felt about them.
“I can’t say I disagree, Gabby,” he said finally. “On the other hand, if the stories about what happened to Eleventh Fleet and Admiral Crandall are anything to go by, this could get . . . interesting.”
“One way to put it, Sir,” Timberlake agreed. “On the other hand, I think I like the thinking behind this. The bastards can’t have those killer missile pods and their damned superdreadnoughts everywhere!”
“They don’t need to have them ‘everywhere’ to ruin our whole day,” Capriotti pointed out dryly. “They only have to have them wherever we turn up.”
“I know, Sir.” The admiral’s flag captain shrugged. “Sooner or later, though, we’ve got to take it to them. And given what they did to Admiral Filareta, it looks like fleet engagements are going to be a really bad idea until our tech people can figure out how to match their damned missiles.”
Capriotti nodded soberly. The Solarian League did need to “take it to” the Manties after the series of massive black eyes the Star Empire and its allies had handed the SLN. Despite any misgivings he might feel, he agreed with the captain about that. He just wished to hell he was more confident those in charge of the taking in question had at least a vague notion of what they were doing.
He wasn’t prepared to wholeheartedly accept the Solarian news reports’ version of what had happened to Massimo Filareta. According to the Manties, Eleventh Fleet had opened fire after being summoned to surrender. According to the “usually reliable sources” talking to the newsies “speaking off the record” because they weren’t “authorized to disclose classified information,” Filareta had accepted their surrender terms, then been blown out of space in an act of cold-blooded mass murder. And according to any official ONI analyses, no one in Old Chicago could find his arse with both hands and approach radar well enough to give one Vincent Capriotti a single damned clue which of those diametrically opposed analyses the Navy shared.
Not a good sign, he thought again. Of course, Intelligence has been caught with its trousers around its ankles every step of the way this far. Maybe the real bad sign would be for the idiots to actually think they did know what happened!
Vincent Capriotti was Battle Fleet from the ground up, and he’d known dozens – scores — of men and women in the ships Crandall and Filareta had lost. Like Timberlake, he wanted payback, and not just out of bloody-minded vengeance, although he was honest enough to admit that was a great deal of his motivation. In addition to that, however, Capriotti had a rather better idea than many of his Battle Fleet compatriots of just how critical the Office of Frontier Security’s unofficial empire of “client star systems” truly was. And along with that, he recognized that OFS’s arrangements were far more fragile than they might appear. The Solarian League literally couldn’t afford what would happen to the federal government’s cash flow if Frontier Security started shedding clients, and unless they demonstrated that they could stand up to the Manties, that was precisely what was going to happen.
On the other hand, the one thing of which Capriotti was certain was that if the Battle — or massacre, or whatever — of Manticore had been as short as both sets of reports suggested, he did not want to tangle with the sort of defenses Manties seemed to think were appropriate for major star systems.
Fortunately, judging from the synopsis of “Operation Buccaneer,” that wasn’t what Admiral Kingsford had in mind. So maybe someone in Old Chicago did have a clue what he was doing.
Maybe.
“All right,” he said finally, turning away from the dispatch to gaze at SLNS Québec’s main astrogation plot. “I need to get Admiral Helland and Admiral Rutgers up to speed on this. I’m sure they’ll both have useful input. Once Rutgers stops warning us not to be overly optimistic, of course.”
His lips twitched and Timberlake actually chuckled. Rear Admiral Lyang-tau Rutgers, Task Force 783’s operations officer, had started out in Frontier Fleet and transferred to Battle Fleet barely twenty years ago. That hadn’t been long enough to completely free him of the basic Frontier Fleet attitude that Battle Fleet would have made an excellent paperweight, especially if that got it out of the way of the people doing the Navy’s real work. Along the way, he’d been known to offer pithy analyses of just how out of date Battle Fleet’s strategic and tactical thinking might have become and he’d argued strenuously that training simulations and fleet problems should be restructured to match the Navy against true peer competitors, despite the fact that “everyone knew” there were none in real life. When confronted with that fact, he’d suggested that it might be better to train against an opponent better than anyone one might actually have to fight. At least that error was unlikely to get anyone killed. Not, as his attitude had made evident, that he’d expected anyone in Battle Fleet to give much thought to that possibility.
The flag captain was pretty sure that attitude explained why an officer of Rutgers’s obvious competence and with the Rutgers family’s military and political connections was still only a rear admiral. But it was rather refreshing in a lot of ways, and she knew Capriotti both respected and genuinely appreciated his contrarian viewpoint.
Vice Admiral Angelica Helland, TF 783’s chief of staff, on the other hand, reminded a lot of people of a smarter Sandra Crandall. Of course, she could hardly have been a stupider Sandra Crandall, now that Timberlake thought about it. The contrast between her aggressive near-arrogance and Rutgers’s voice of caution made for occasionally fractious staff meetings, but it also offered Capriotti a robust debate between differing viewpoints. That was something he’d valued even before anyone started shooting at the SLN, which had been rare, to say the least, among Battle Fleet four-star admirals.
At the moment, Helland and Rutgers were in transit back to Québec from observing a training simulation aboard the battlecruiser Bavaria, the flagship of TG 783.12. Thanks to the classification level of the dispatch, they had no idea why they’d been summoned home so abruptly.
Be interesting to watch their reactions, the flag captain thought.
“Just between you and me, I’m all in favor of our not being ‘overly optimistic,’ Sir,” she said aloud, and Capriotti nodded.
