Shadow of Freedom

And I’m not about to discombobulate my command arrangements at a time like this, especially if it’s just somebody with a nose bent out of shape because she’s senior to Vicki and thinks she ought to be Tenth Fleet’s flag captain!

She snorted mentally at the thought. In less than one T-day, Tenth Fleet would be dropping out of hyper in the Meyers System. Not a good time to be tinkering with its command structure.

“All right, people,” she said out loud. “Now that that particular pressing question has been dealt with, I think it’s time all of us got some sleep.” She smiled again, this time without any humor at all. “After all, we’re likely to be just a bit busy tomorrow.”

* * *

“Oh, shit.”

“What was that?” CPO Sylvia Chu, chief of the watch in Meyers Astro Control, looked up from the endless stream of memos and directives on her own display with a stab of irritation as she heard the soft, fervent mutter. Commodore Thurgood’s upcoming exercise loomed large in Chu’s thoughts at the moment, and she needed to get her paperwork at least under control (she was never going to get it finished; that was a given in the Navy) to clear the decks for it. As Lieutenant Bristow had pointed out to her only that morning, screwing up the exercise because they’d missed dotting some “i” or crossing some “t” would constitute a Bad Thing.

And so would a last-minute sensor snafu, which was why the comment from Petty Officer 2/C Alan Coker, who was currently manning the outer system surveillance platforms, had set off Chu’s internal alarms. The outer platforms were even more urgently in need of upgrade and replacement than the inner platforms, and thelast thing she needed with the exercise looming on the horizon was for one of her primary sensor nodes to report a malfunction. That would not look good on her next efficiency report…which was due in less than two T-months.

There was no immediate response to her question, and she frowned as Coker leaned closer to his own console. Coker could be a royal pain in the ass, but although she would have gone far out of her way to avoid admitting it, Chu regarded him as one of the three best sensor techs assigned to the Meyers System. His defects—and the reason someone of his ability was still only a second-class petty officer—stemmed from a certain lack of patience with officers in general coupled with what Chu thought of as the “old Frontier Fleet hand” syndrome. Coker had seen more incompetent officers with family connections than he could have counted come and go during his career, and he’d spent more than his fair share of time cleaning up after them. It gave him an edge of something entirely too much like insolence towards the commissioned nitwits who came his way, but his decades of service had also made him very good at his job. He was, quite literally, too valuable to be canned.

Which was why his present expression sent another, sharper tremor of unease through Chu’s professional instincts.

Coker’s hands moved across his console for several seconds, obviously double checking and refining whatever had drawn his attention. Then he straightened and looked at Chu.

“We are so screwed,” he said flatly.

“I realize you have a reputation to maintain as a character,” Chu replied tartly. “But unless you want to be ripped a new one, I’d appreciate a report one hell of a lot more detailed than ‘We are so screwed.’”

“Sorry about that, Chief.” His smile was a grimace, but there was also genuine apology in it. “It’s just—” He gestured at his display. “The outer platforms are calling it twenty-eight superdreadnoughts, Chief.” He shook his head. “And whoever they are, they sure as hell aren’t ours!”

* * *

“It’s confirmed, Commodore,” Captain Thora Macpherson said flatly. “Definitely twenty-eight in the superdreadnought range, judging from their impeller signatures. Not only that, but their accel inbound is over five hundred and thirty KPS squared.” A smile as grim as her tone flitted across her face. “They haven’t said anything to us yet, but given that number and that accel, there’s not much question who they are.”

Commodore Thurgood nodded, not that he’d really needed his operations officer’s last sentence. For that matter, he hadn’t needed the acceleration rate. There was no way in hell anybody he wanted to see would be sending that many ships-of-the-wall to a miserable, back-of-beyond system like Meyers, and that left only one candidate.

“Well, that’s a pisser,” Captain Hideoshi Wayne, Thurgood’s chief of staff, observed.

“You do have a way with words, don’t you, Hideoshi?”

“Sorry, Sir.” Wayne grimaced.