The Face of the Enemy
Rebecca exited the lift and walked toward her pinnace. Deidre paced her. "We're almost ready to depart, skipper. Slated to move on schedule."
"Once we know what the schedule is. The crew?"
"95% are already aboard. The last draft is coming aboard today. We're also waiting on the Havenite missile techs we're taking."
Rebecca almost snarled. Instead of just having some Havenites aboard for a few hours showing her people the differences between their missiles and Manticore's, she had been informed that she was carrying almost a hundred of the bastards to deliver to Spindle before deploying, and a dozen more who would remain aboard. The intercom sounded, and the loudspeaker clicked. "Republic of Haven Pinnaces requesting permission to come aboard."
Rebecca changed course, heading to the nearest intercom panel. "Grant permission."
"Understood, Captain." Then the loudspeaker clicked again. "All hands, Cargo two is opening hatches. All hands clear Cargo two." Followed by a klaxon as crewmen scurried toward the inner hatches. Closer to the pinnace than the hatches, Rebecca and Hughes went aboard, and the pinnace buttoned up. They could hear the klaxon even inside the vehicle, then it died as air was pumped out of the compartment.
If it were an holo drama the approaching ships would have been of either a clunky design since the old People's Republic had been so behind technically, or a design that just looked evil, like the bad guys in such dramas.
Actually they were clean well designed craft, only the marking telling her it had belonged to an enemy she had fought for almost half of her life. They settled side by side near her own pinnace, then the hatches closed, and the compartment re-pressurized. She opened the hatch of her own pinnace as the side hatch of the nearest Havenite opened instead of the stern ramp, and a dozen men and women in the Republic of Haven's uniform came down the steps. The leader wore a Commander's uniform, with a lieutenant JG, an ensign, and nine enlisted men from a Senior Chief down to a 1st class computer tech.
She stepped back onto her deck as they stopped, forming a line while the senior officer came forward. He was almost two meters tall, slim and lithe, with blond hair and a ready smile. He stopped in front of Rebecca, and snapped a salute. "Request permission to come aboard?"
She returned it. "Granted." Her hand dropped back down. "Captain Rebecca Duvalier of HMS Witch Maiden. This is my Executive officer Lieutenant commander Diedre Hughes."
"Lieutenant Commander Phillipe Duval, Detachment 1241." He replied. "Though my last assignment was tactical officer of the minelayer Tassfaronga. The personnel you are merely transporting are still aboard, or aboard the other pinnace." He motioned. "May I?" She nodded. He took her down the line. She greeted each of them gravely. Except for the 1st class, all were actually rather attractive people. That man visibly fit the 'thug' role you might have expected of an HD drama, but he had a surprisingly soft and mellow voice, and a tendency to blush.
"All of my people are specialists in our missile pods, and they have full documentation equal to your operator's manuals for them." Duval said as they reached the end of the line. "My computer specialist Jacques Chartaine is fully conversant with all of our deployed penaids, and how they correspond with your own equipment. Blush for the women, Jacques." Chartaine blushed on cue.
"Well Commander, we both know that it will be hard for our people, on both sides, to put aside twenty years of hatred. My officers and senior ratings have already been told to accept the good your Navy has done is helping to protect our homes. I ask that you and yours try not to turn up the heat if at all possible. I would stay and welcome you aboard more fully, but I have a final briefing I must attend." She turned to Hughes. "Stay on top of it, Number One, and you too, Commander. One thing we don't need is starting a brand new war here."
Amen to that. Diedre thought as she saluted, and Rebecca entered the pinnace. She turned back to the man beside her. "If you would bring the other personnel out now, we'll see about quartering them."
More of the same
Rebecca looked at the office. It hadn't changed that much in the almost eight months since she had last seen it. She nodded to Yeoman 1st Kellogg, sitting with her briefcase on her knees. She stripped off the white beret, slipping it under her epaulette, and closed her eyes. What little she knew of the new assignment still worried her. There was no way any ship could patrol such a massive area efficiently.
"Captain? The Second Space Lord will see you now."
"Thank you." She stood, walking into the office. Vice Admiral Patricia Givens stood, walking around her desk to clasp Rebecca's hand. "Well done on that last deployment, Captain."
"We did what we could, ma'am." Rebecca replied.
"'What you could'." Givens snorted. "You handed the League a defeat that made Spindle look like a pillow fight! An SD task force, a CLAC task group, and a mothball fleet destroyed all in one system by one Merchant cruiser? What did you think we expected?"
"We did what we had to do, Ma'am."
"Tell it to the Queen, Captain." Givens turned to walk toward the small cozy conversation aside from her desk. "Both you and your LAC squadron commander are to be down at Mount Royal Palace tomorrow at 1400."
"Ma'am?"
Givens took a medal box from her desk, sliding it across the table to Rebecca. "You're going to receive your Monarch's thanks. And your LAC Squadron commander is to receive the Sword to go with her shield. But not until tomorrow."
Rebecca took the box, opening it. The Grayson shield was equal to the Manticoran Gallantry Medal. But the Sword and Shield was on the order of the Manticoran Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. While freely given before, she had never heard of a woman getting it.
"Now, you've been given the precis of your new mission."
"Yes, ma'am." Rebecca closed the medal box. "That worried me."
"How so?" Givens took her chair, fingers steepling below her chin.
"My Lord." Rebecca fell back on the title of the other woman's office. "According to the patrol schedule I have been given, you have my one ship acting again as an armed merchant cruiser trolling for pirates, and in so doing covering an area almost twice that of the entire Silesian Confederacy. I know seven of the eight systems in it have at least a destroyer already in place, but even with that added to the equation my one ship could never cover that volume by herself efficiently."
"Well spotted." Given laughed. "The delivery was an accident. A lieutenant down in Astrography sent the wrong packet; that one was going to HMAMC Wicklow, one of the other Trojan Horses bound for Spindle with six others. He was just told to send it to all of the present Merchant Cruisers, and didn't know that you had a different assignment. They're deploying tomorrow."
"No, Witch Maiden, and those other ships of your new command are going to Torch."
"Torch?"
"Yes. We in ONI are worried about what Mesa might do in that region. They tried to nuke Torch using StateSec holdouts as their mercenaries a few months ago. They were pounded to scrap by a Task Force from the Maya Sector, and all of the surviving ships were handed to Torch as the start of their navy. They also got sixteen of the SDs captured from Spindle which the Queen gave to them, along with all of the older Havenite ships of the Protector's Own from Grayson, so suddenly they're a tougher nut to crack; or will be when they grow into those ships. But we can't assist them directly at the moment.
"We have notified our treaty partners of the end of our war with Haven, but until we can have their representatives all get together with Haven's people to hammer out a true peace we won't even know how many of the Alliance members will remain. Not without having them think we're doing another High Ridge on them. Until that is done we cannot merely withdraw our units from those systems, or the ones we presently occupy that used to be Havenite until the plebiscites in those systems occur; That was part of the initial treaty, along with Erewhon being asked to assume oversight to those plebiscites.
"So almost a third of our ships are tied up until then. The Republic has the same problem. They can't very well stand down enough ships to man Torch's until the treaty is ratified without Senate Approval, which will happen sometime around the heat death of the Universe. Besides. We believe the Solarians will push the pace somehow, so every ship they have is necessary right now.
"We also dare not drawdown Home fleet too much to reinforce the Torch with the League only a transit away via the Beowulf link to the Junction, and Beowulf possibly under threat. Which is where you and the remaining twelve ships of Trojan Horse come in.
"We need to use merchant cruisers but the Janacek Admiralty shot us in the foot with that yet again. You command the only one of them with anywhere near full design capability. All but Witch Maiden have been gutted; no missile tubes, pod launching capability, but until now none with more than a token load out except your own, and no LACs, with no time or capability to reequip them. But those ships can be detached readily and are enroute here as we speak. As I just pointed out, Wicklow and some of the others are going to be sent to the Quadrant, in fact all but three are bound there. The other two are yours."
She took out a data chip. "Congratulations, Captain. You have been brevetted to Commodore in charge of Operation Treecat. The first of your ships will be here in time to greet you when you arrive at the terminus. Thanks to Sidemore, we even have an ace that wasn't anticipated."
"Sidemore? We are talking about the same system, aren't we?"
"Sidemore, in their own way, handed us as big a surprise as Grayson did when they began designing their own ships. That is why R&D weren't as surprised as you anticipated when you handed over those Solarian LACs. You see, the Sidemore navy has already fielded something like it."
"How did they manage that?"
"Their navy is young, barely eleven years old, and still small; barely a light task force so far. But thanks to Second Marsh they got a leg up we hadn't anticipated. All of the surviving LACs that were captured in the system were handed over to them, except for the ones we took ourselves for analysis, something like 400 of them. They also had the shipyard modules both the Dempsey and Hauptmann Cartels had sent in, and all of the wreckage from the destroyed Republican ships. What they did was use it. So four of their newest ships will be joining your flotilla."
"Four LACs?"
"Four CLACs to be precise." Givens waved a hand. "Someone there had read old Earth's Naval history. They designed light CLACs to carry the birds they have with the Grayson touch for their LAC complement."
"How did they pull that off?"
Givens laughed again. "When the Republic's Second fleet hit Marsh during Operation Thunderbolt they lost 10 SD(P), 6 older SDs and 3 CLACs. Not all of them were catastrophic kills either. Under interstellar law, that wreckage belongs to them. So among the salvage, they picked up a few hyper generators, compensators, and enough alpha and beta nodes in good condition. We took a few, of course for study. But the rest was theirs. That included all of the Pirate vessels we took."
"But they took four of the merchies around the four megaton range and designed their own carriers using Havenite hyper generators, Haven's version of the Grayson Mod 3 compensators, and SD alpha and beta nodes so they are actually a bit faster than your own ship. They also refit the Cimmeterres they have with fission plants and our EW gear, and changed out their missiles using the older Mk20 missiles our SDs and dreadnoughts assigned there still carried and have been judged as surplus. So you have ten missiles each with a 13 million kilometer range and off bore sighting.
"The CLACs they are sending are that first four with eight building. In fact we are looking at using the same concept to speed delivery of our LACs to the Quadrant after modifying their CLACs to carry our larger birds; as well as delivery of spare craft and crews to deployed CLACs as operations begin in earnest against the League."
"But their population is what, only about 20 million all told? They can't support that massive a build up without more people and a lot more money than we could offer them."
"They won't have to. Where do you think we placed the remedial education training center for Northern Silesia's old Confederation navy? Those who were competent and above all honest were retained in place as you know. But the others... we sent them to Sidemore. So they have enough officers and men there in training to crew about fifteen of their carriers at 3,000 men per ship once we weed out the criminal and stupid. You might say the price of their redemption is a cruise aboard one of Sidemore's units. And as for paying for them, Sidemore captured one of Andre Warnecke's pirates, and capturing Silas gave us the largest score against pirates in history."
Rebecca nodded. She'd heard about it all after the fact during her tenure in Silesia aboard this very ship. Silas; a merchant ship captured and converted to a sort of half assed liner had been on a run to the system where Warnecke sent the prizes his flotilla captured. When she'd come back into the Marsh system a month after HMAC Wayfarer had taken down Warnecke's men, she had sailed in fat and happy with eight hundred odd men from prize crews to find themselves under the guns of the six modern LACs left by that warship. Ten days later the smallest of the remaining pirates, a frigate, had waltzed in and gotten blown away; The LAC commanders didn't intend to take the chance with something that could shoot back.
The data retrieved from Silas' computers had been a gold mine. That information had broken not one but three rings of conspirators in the following years. One for the ships being sold, another for their cargoes, and a third for the black market suppliers of their missiles, inside both Silesia and the league. Two Siliesian Sector governors, nine Silesian officers from a captain to three Admirals, two OFS Shell Sector governors, the owners of seven small Solarian shipping lines and two Frontier Fleet Admirals had gone to the gallows over that. About a hundred lesser members of those conspirators had received prison sentences that were measured in decades.
Unlike their uneven record on genetic slavery, the League came down very hard on pirates and especially on their fences; unless their commanders happened to be OFS governors in the Verge. The Solarian courts had awarded Sidemore with more than enough funds to pay for the fleet they were building.
"On top of that, the carriers you'll be escorting will be leaving their LACs in Torch at the end of the deployment and getting paid well for them."
"It's a good thing someone is getting good from all of this hell."
"True. So on to your assignment.
"Witch Maiden and her fellows are going to stop briefly at Erewhon to liaise with their Fleet command. They will then proceed to Torch where the CLACs will be stationed, supposedly to transfer their craft. However, they will be your ace in the hole at need.
"Torch and Beowulf's Biological Survey Corps will give you transponder codes as Andermani merchant vessels sold to the people of Torch, and manned by Manticoran nationals. Torch has already set up sales of pharmaceuticals and derivatives through companies in all four of the nearby Solarian Sectors, and had asked us to sell them some of our ships. However, we were unable to supply their need, so the Empire did, supposedly. To maintain that cover, each of your Q ships will drop off half of your loads of the Republican pods and the Republican teams to maintain and assist Torch in their use for system defense to clear up cargo space.
"You will be met there by representatives of the Maya Sector. What you will really be doing is looking for any sign of a build up of ships aimed at Maya Sector. The Frontier Fleet dispositions in those Sectors will be part of your briefing packet, so if a Sector has a sudden jump in deployed vessels from either Frontier Fleet, or any known Battle Fleet units you will know it.
"Your job this time is not to get in their face unless there is no alternative. The data you gather will not only aid us, it will cement a friendship we hope to expand with the Mayan Sector, And renew that link with Erewhon and Torch.
"We have an intelligence office with deeper contacts in that region than we do, and she will be assigned to your ship; ostensibly as a merchant factor and owner aboard." Givens tapped the button on her side of the table. The door hissed open, and Rebecca started.
"Hello, Captain." Jinhua Kiel said with a smile.
"Commander?"
"No, I am Grafin Du Sedlow, representing a consortium of Pharmaceutical manufacturers inside the Empire."
"I thought the Emperor was bowing out of the war."
"Oh he's bowed out of the Alliance, not out of the war." Givens commented.
"There are advantages to not being your ally during this conflict." Jinhua commented. "As your Queen and Lady Dame Honor Harrington-Alexander pointed out, if your Alliance were to send a fleet through to Beowulf and head for the Visigoth Wormhole junction, you would run into not only Battle Fleet but systems defense forces fighting you every step of the way. But if someone unaligned were to do so..." She gave a smile that any predator would love. "Mesa is only one transit away, and we have business with those fehlgeleiteten Übermenschen."
"Mother of God."
"Do not waste your prayers on them, Captain. They not only murdered the nephew of the Emperor and attempted to murder his son, they struck directly at the succession!" Jinhua's voice was harsh. "As your own bible says, they have sowed the winds, and now will reap the whirlwind."
"So you're just some noblewoman on this trip?
"A noblewoman who is still attached to our staff intelligence, with orders to pass on all information I gather from our embassies that is relevant to our... friends." Oh, and your boss."
Rebecca snarled. "Ever since you had me pretend to be your purser, you've dreamed of this day." She growled.
Jinhua dimpled. "Let us just say, captain, I am particular about who shares my bed."
"I think there is a story there-" Givens began.
"No Admiral. There is nothing to it, I swear!" Rebecca tried to defuse the comment.
"Don't swear, Captain. It's a very bad habit. Now if you would come with me..." Rebecca stood, her face threatening, and Jinhua's so sweet and light that the captain just had to find something to do to get even.
The Corbin Protocols: Phase One
The pinnace landed gently on the Witch Maiden's deck, and the loudhailer called, "Witch Maiden Arriving, Witch Maiden aboard." as Rebecca stormed down the ramp. Behind her came Jinhua, seven servants, her daughter, and for all she knew, a partridge in a pear tree.
Unlike Commander Kiel, who had been able to arrange for the four lockers that held her gear, the Grafin Du Sedlow needed those servants just to shift the small mountain of gear that a Countess required to be perfect in all things. Fenghua Kiel walked with the captain as she stalked across her deck. "I know Mutti is enjoying herself, Captain, but she was ordered to make the, how you say, 'big splash' when we get to Torch and the League."
"So you know about that, Munchkin?"
"Munchkin? This word I do not know."
"A well loved children's story of the Pre Diaspora times. The munchkins were a people of small stature in a fictional world called Oz; the first people met by a young girl named Dorothy in the very first book of the series."
"A series of books about these Munchkins?"
"No, of the adventures Dorothy had in that world." Rebecca nodded to herself. "I will have chief Oselli download the series for you; though it is much better if someone reads it to you."
Fenghua's face fell. "My mother has not read me a story in a long, long time, kapitain. Mein Vater did long ago, but he died."
"That is sad. Tell you what, if I get the chance, I will read at least the first book to you. All right?"
"Wunderbar!"
Diedre Hughes looked at her captain, and the pint sized shadow. "Taking on passengers, are we, Ma'am?"
"Clear the area Commander Kiel had for her staff on the last trip, Number One. The large compartment are for the Grafin Du Sedlow and her daughter, the other for the servant staff. Have the closest mess deck arrange to feed them, though I think the Countess' cook might want to have some say in the menu..." She shrugged. "Give me a while, Diedre. It's the first I heard about it too."
"Yes, ma'am. As for cooking..."
Rebecca wanted to groan. "Out with it."
"The cook assigned to the Republican passenger's mess deck delivered something the Havenites protested."
"Who protested?"
"Captain Roclair. After hearing his protest, and investigating, I felt it was justified." Roclair was the senior officer of the entire Republican party.
"If you will excuse us, Fenghua?" She asked the girl. "Commander Hughes and I have a problem that needs solving." The girl headed back to her mother. "Out with it, Number One."
"For dinner, while the rest of the crew was having roast beef with all the normal trimmings, the Havenites were served cold cuts and bread, with limited condiments. By limited, I mean they had white bread, plain mustard and mayonnaise and nothing else, To drink they had water."
Rebecca closed her eyes, counting to ten in English, followed by Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Welsh Gaelic, and when that did not cool her down, Manx Gaelic followed by Breton. She opened her eyes. "Tell the Senior Chief that the same cook will make their breakfast. He is not to reprimand the person for his insulting behavior, nor apologize to the Havenites. I think I must trot out what an old skipper of mine used to do. What I call the Corbin Protocols."