The junior officers had just dropped into their pods when Ng reached the bridge. On the main viewscreen the Tenno pulsed quietly in the absence of input, vivid against skip-blanked darkness.
Commander Krajno returned command to Ng, who said, “Status?”
“Emergence minus three minutes, sir. Standard approach, as you ordered.”
That would put them within one light-minute of the Treymontaigne beacon in the leading trojan of the sunward giant in the system, just as at Wolakota. Another by-the-book approach.
Krajno turned, one bushy eyebrow raised interrogatively. She wasn’t sure herself why she hadn’t taken them directly to Treymontaigne orbit, since Harimoto would have taken care of Eichelly by now. It wasn’t as though a battlecruiser needed to worry about the fuel and navigational advantages the skip well of a major trojan attractor offered.
Not even a hunch, really. She shrugged away the thought. Krajno certainly wouldn’t question her decision. Especially when doing so would make him look overeager for his reunion.
Not that she blamed him. They both were aware how Navy romances were hell on the emotions. Krajno hadn’t seen Tiburon for, what was it, almost a year now. She smiled to herself. They made quite a couple, Commander Perthes ban-Krajno, executive officer of the Grozniy, and Commander Tiburon nyr-Ketzaliqhon, chief energeticist of His Majesty’s battlecruiser Prabhu Shiva. Tiburon was tall, slender, the picture of Douloi elegance. More than one unlucky officer had mistaken the burly, rough-edged Krajno, when the two men were together in mufti, for the other’s valet or bodyguard. It was a mistake no one made twice. The funniest part of it was that Krajno was the intellectual of the two—Tiburon’s world consisted of his engines and Krajno.
She sat back, granting tacit permission to chat as she assessed the mood of her alpha crew and watched how they handled their consoles. She still wasn’t sure about young Wychyrski and the absurdly gorgeous Ammant, although they’d performed well enough at Wolakota.
But Ammant can’t help his face, and as for her age, I was no older than Wychyrski on my first posting, when Jauntevant was jumped by the Shiidra...
They were both excellent young officers, who worked doubly hard to overcome prejudices they couldn’t help, and there was no sense in second-guessing her own decision to emerge green rather than pulling in the senior crew.
Rom-Sanchez glanced her way before saying to Wychyrski, “Sixty-two hours since Wolakota. Maybe thirty-two hours or so since Eichelly skipped in. By now, his pieces are likely well on their way to joining the Oort Cloud here.”
Wyrchyrski uttered a sinister chuckle. “I wish he’d picked Schadenheim.”
The descending tones of emergence put an end to their conversation; a dizzying sense of deja vu gripped Ng as Wyrchyrski announced, “No beacon, sir.”
She responded without hesitation. “Tactical skip, now.”
Ng’s mind flickered through scenarios. Harimoto would have deployed a new beacon immediately after taking care of the Rifters. Had Prabhu Shiva left the system before Eichelly reached it? But assuming Eichelly destroyed the beacon as soon as he arrived, Treymontaigne should have sent a ship to investigate in the thirty-odd hours since?
Moments later SigInt reported, “All sensors functional.” Good. Ran the check faster this time.“Ship signatures working, negative.”
“Tactical, take us to threat-level two.”
Rom-Sanchez’s acknowledgement was followed instantly by other station echoes, led by Fire Control: “All ruptors to standby. Skipmissile activated, holding at precharge level.”
Up on the main screen, a plot of the Treymontaigne system based on their assumed position windowed up as Rom-Sanchez anticipated her next request. The flaring red of maximum probability centered on the nearest k-zone, twelve light-minutes away.
Ng tabbed her console and started a ten-minute countdown.
As Commander Krajno monitored the multiple reports flooding the bridge while the ship came up to level two, he muttered, “Harimoto’ll be furious at missing this chance, even if he did get away from hand-wiping Treymontaigne.”
Ng’s answer died unspoken when Ensign Wychyrski at SigInt looked up. “Captain, I’ve got a large object about twelve light-minutes in, relative velocity about five hundred kays.” She stopped, worked her console for a moment, then frowned, all her characteristic humor gone. “The readings are confusing. I’m getting a thermal reading at the million-degree level, and some gravitational disturbances as well.”
The bridge had gone quiet. That was the unmistakable signature of a shipwreck, resulting from destabilized spin reactors and drives.
Then they did catch up with Eichelly. But why hasn’t the beacon... ? Ng’s thoughts splintered as Wychyrski’s next words destroyed that hypothesis.
“But I read its mass at about ten-power-twelve tons. There’s an awful lot of debris—thermal scattering—around it, too.”
Way too big for a destroyer. Ng looked at Krajno, who shrugged and shook his head. “No ideas here, Captain.”
And not quite big enough to be a battlecruiser. A startling thought. No battlecruiser had ever been lost in action against Rifters. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be that. Perhaps Eichelly had run into an asteroid while fleeing the Prabhu Shiva, as unlikely as that was.
“Give me a visual. Maximum enhancement. Navigation, bring us about for maximum array effectiveness.”
At this distance, the optical array formed by the sensors on the Grozniy’s hull could resolve details down to less than twenty meters, as long as the ship was oriented correctly.
The tactical plot dwindled into a corner of the screen as the starfield began to slew in response to her order. The screen blinked and a blur of light slid into view, gradually sharpening as the ship’s motion ceased. Then the enhancers cut in and Ng’s ears rang with shock.
Mercilessly clear, the details hardly concealed by the limits of resolution, the shattered hulk of a battlecruiser blazed silently.
One third of its length was gone, torn away by some unimaginable force; in its shattered interior a blue-white glare pulsed, emitting sheets and sprays of fluorescing gas as the dying engines yielded up their energies into space. As the hulk rotated, the distance-blurred form of Shiva Nataraja came slowly into view, his lower body obliterated, his four arms still upraised in the eternal dance of creation and destruction.
Mzinga’s quiet report felt like a detonation in the silence. “Position confirmed, sir. Treymontaigne system, absolute bearing 252.6 mark 1.1, plus 53 light-minutes.” The tactical plot on another screen rippled.
Ng started at a sudden crunching noise nearby. She stared at the blood dripping unnoticed from Commander Krajno’s hand, clenched around the ruins of one of his pod’s arms. His face, seen in profile, was calm, only a ridge of muscle around his mouth betraying his emotions.
Ng found her voice. “General quarters. Engineering, teslas to threat-level three, rig engines for max-tac maneuvers. Fire Control, charge skipmissile, ready all ruptors. SigInt, pop that tacponder.”
A flare of light pinpointed it on the tactical plot as she shifted momentarily into eyes-on mode; a glyph indicated less than twenty seconds until its returning squirt reached them.
“Alerts on multiple widecasts, no link found.” Ammant’s voice was flat with strain, his beautiful rosewood complexion blanched to the shade of old cheese. “Captain, you’d better see this.”
At Ng’s nod, he fumbled at his console. A thin, mewling shriek filled the bridge, overlaid with the raucous laughter of a mob and broken by transmission losses that the enhancers couldn’t eliminate. The sound clenched at her throat, but worse was the image. Two seconds was all she endured before she slammed down a hand and cut it off.
“Rifters, in the Archonic Enclave,” Ammant continued, his voice thin as he continued to watch on his console, the shriek still faintly audible to the bridge at large. “It’s the Archon.” He choked. “O Telos—” He touched his console with one shaking hand and then bent swiveled his pod away and was rackingly ill.
Ng’s breath caught as the fiveskip burred momentarily. “Skip-pulse, Captain,” Wychyrski said, snapping her head back from a horrified glance at Ammant. SigInt’s voice was tight, but under control as she chanted, “One light-minute out. ID processing, signature was corvette-class.”
Moments later the same skip pulse echoed from SigInt. Tenno updates rippled across the screens.
“Signature matches Noisy Girl, last reported as part of Eichelly’s fleet,” finished Wychyrski.
Now they know we’re here.
“Navigation, as soon as SigInt relays the squirt from that tacponder, take us in to one light-second. Communications, on emergence scan for life-signs, full noetic enhancement.” That would normally be SigInt’s function, but Ammant, now recovering, needed distraction.
The hoarse summons of the klaxon had seemed to breathe life into the bridge, but Ng could see the rigidity of tension in the movements of the crew. She tabbed her console and signaled the Environmental officer to bias the tianqi toward stress relief and cut the subsonics. They needed no additional cues to key them up.
The hatch hissed open, and a medic moved to Krajno’s pod.
The klaxon fell silent. The atmosphere of rage seemed to thicken as the seconds dragged on. The horror slid out of sight as Navigation brought the ship around for the next skip. Then the communications console bleeped.
”Tacponder responding... monitoring was engaged.” Ensign Wychyrski’s fingers tapped nervously at the keypads. There was a faint squeal from her console as the discriminators shifted into search mode, then the fiveskip engaged with a brief subsonic burp. After that, silence.
The Tenno overlaid on the main viewscreen told Ng almost instantly what SigInt reported in bridge cadence, rounding off the numbers, but she knew that the crew needed the distraction of duty. And what will I distract myself with?
“Tacponder recorded four skip-pulses over a period of about a thirty seconds, destroyer and frigate. Then a fairly large EM burst and particle shower at about minus 31.6 hours. At that point the nav beacon ceased radiating and there were two more skip-pulses, followed by just one 11.7 minutes later. Then a skip pulse and interrogation at about minus thirty-point-eight hours. 10.7 minutes after that, another skip pulse, then another a minute later followed by a gravitational disturbance consonant with ruptor-tractor activity. Ten seconds after that a skip-pulse, followed by skip noise—most likely a skipmissile—then a very large burst of EM and gravitational radiation, followed by a particle shower. Seventeen minutes later, two more skip-pulses, nearly simultaneous. Finally, a skip pulse at minus 30.6 hours.”
“Tactical?” Taken by themselves, each of the events was easy enough to interpret in the context of a beacon-bashing response, but they didn’t add up.
Rom-Sanchez was staring at the blank screen. Then he shook his head. “Doesn’t make any sense. We’ve got two Rifter ships, but it was the frigate that took up station in the k-zone after the destroyer blasted the nav beacon. Judging from the timing of the interrogation, the Shiva responded less than twenty minutes after the signal stopped at Treymontaigne. SOP would have been watching from a light hour out—that last pulse. He did a quick re-check of the target’s position from a light minute out, following up with a tractor attack, confirming that the target was a frigate, and then—”
He stopped as the screen flickered and the disintegrating hulk of the Prabhu Shiva sprang into full clarity. At this distance the resolution was on the order of centimeters. The image expanded, giving Ng the dizzying feeling that she was falling into the hellish pit of energy that burned at the heart of the shattered battlecruiser. The broken edges of the hull were strangely smooth: there was no spalling, no twisted petals of hull alloy. That was the unmistakable signature of the impact of something moving so fast that no material could propagate a shock wave.
“Continue, Lieutenant,” said Ng. The bridge crew needed more time to recover. So do I.
“Ten seconds after Prabhu Shiva grabbed the frigate, the destroyer returned and fired a skipmissile. The Prabu Shiva blew up.” He shook his head, his voice dropping out of report cadence. “Why weren’t the shields up? How did the destroyer find Shiva so quickly?”
It was impossible that Harimoto would have left his shields down. No captain in the Navy would have done that, not even one of the Aerenarch’s silver-polishers. The phrase brought recognition that she was in danger of losing her emotional balance.
Then a memory bubbled up. There’s something wrong with that skipmissile impact. Wychyrski’s voice in her mind blended with SigInt’s real-time report. “Debris analysis consonant with skipmissile impact.”
There was a pause, long only in her perception, before Ensign Ammant spoke, his voice rigidly controlled. “Noetic scan negative. No survivors.”
“Navigation, take us ten light minutes down and inward.”
This was not a typical Rifter incursion. That widecast would not have reached them had the planetary shield still been up, and the invaders were already down on the planet.
Ng damped down the swirl of speculation that threatened to overwhelm her. Nothing made any sense, so the first priority was more information.
She turned to Krajno. “Commander, prepare to deploy a VSA, with whatever resources it will take to see what happened here, and afterwards the initial Rifter attack on Treymontaigne. Relay the proper coordinates to Navigation.”
“Captain!” Krajno’s voice was raw. “At least part of the Rifter force is downside. If we follow up immediately we can take them out. We still have the advantage. Let’s use it.”
That’s exactly what that transmission was designed to provoke.
With her peripheral vision Ng noted the focus of the entire bridge, but she kept her gaze on Commander Krajno. “Harimoto no doubt thought he, too, had the advantage, Commander Krajno.” She saw her formality strike home. “Kindly execute your orders. You may post a formal objection in the log if you so desire.”
Krajno gave his head a slight shake: Ng knew he was back in control of himself.
“It’s less than 33 hours since that action,” she continued, “and the Rifters have already taken the planet. I want to know how before we go in all ruptors blazing.” She raised her voice slightly to a more formal cadence. “I assure you,” she added, as much for her XO as for the bridge crew, “we will not leave this system without dealing with Eichelly.”
The crew was busy at their tasks. Ng hesitated, ready to replace Ammant, but he’d pulled himself together, his shoulder blades working the back of his uniform tunic as he rapidly scanned for more coms. Pleased with his mettle, she thought, I’ll have to keep them all busy, not just Perthes.
But her XO was well taken care of now: deploying a virtual sensor array capable of resolving useful details at a distance of nearly one-and-a-half light-days would involve some or all of the Grozniy’s corvettes, each linked to the ship via laser to create a sensor array hundreds of kilometers across. The proper size of such an array was a trade-off between resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, and although they’d drilled the evolution twice during their out-octant patrol, it hadn’t been for an event this far in the past. Perthes would have to push the crew—and himself—hard now, for every minute that passed before deployment would cost them another light-minute of distance from the action, reducing further the detail they would be able to see. Just the sort of task that Krajno needed right now.
“Communications.” When Ammant looked up, she said, “When we skip to VSA distance, shift your compute priority to discrimination of what you’ve recorded up to that point, until we shift focus to Treymontaigne.” The ensign’s sculpted cheekbones flooded with color. He was still obviously regretting his lapse as he bent over his console.
“SigInt,” she said, “at Wolakota you reported something strange about the skipmissile impact we witnessed. I’d like to see your report now.”
Too little to go on, so far, Ng thought, and winced at the memory of the Archon’s torment. There’s nothing we can do for him. She felt she at least owed it to him to view more of that record. But not now. First we watch the death of Prabhu Shiva and plan our response. One thing was certain: when they faced Eichelly in the inner system, there would be no mercy.
“Lieutenant.” Rom-Sanchez looked up sharply, the puppy utterly gone. “I want every bit of tactical information we can squeeze out of that array. Consult with Commander Krajno and make sure it’s set to grab whatever you need.”
The rear hatch opened as the Marine guard admitted a swabbie with a mop, reminding Ng of one more responsibility. One of the first lessons of command was that the truth was easier to deal with than rumor. She brought her finger down decisively on the ship-comm, and the traditional twitter of the pipes filled the air, alerting every station in the ninety-two cubic kilometers of the Grozniy and carrying her voice to every one of the five thousand crew aboard.
”This is the captain...”
o0o
Less than two hours later, Krajno reported, “Deployment complete.” His voice was flat, his eyes red-rimmed. “Twelve Raven-class corvettes with 150-meter arrays, in a one-thousand-kilometer virtual array.” He paused. “Laser links established, tractors engaged. Stabilization will take about a minute.”
Ng calculated briefly. That would give them nearly fifty-meter optical resolution, and even better at higher frequencies. It would be enough.
“I specified an hour ahead of the action,” said Rom-Sanchez. “Commander Krajno and I agree that we can’t afford to miss any tactical preparation on Eichelly’s part, and this way we’ll see what Prabhu Shiva saw if Captain Harimoto followed SOP. A light-hour’s loss of resolution won’t make enough difference to matter.”
Ng nodded. That had been her conclusion as well.
“I want the optical portion of the action piped into General Access,” she said.
The viewscreen wavered as the array came on-line; a small targeting cross blinked near the center, marking the position of the navigational beacon.
“I have a ship trace, battlecruiser signature, plus 34.6 light-hours. No ID.” Another positioning cross appeared near the first; the trace was nearly between them and the beacon, normal to its position from the ecliptic as was standard naval practice.
“That’d be the Prabhu Shiva,” Rom-Sanchez stated, showing his usual eagerness. “Watching the destruction of the beacon from a light-hour down.”
“Harimoto ran a taut ship.” Commander Krajno’s voice rumbled in his chest. “Fast and by the book.”
The unspoken question occupied them all: so how had a Rifter destroyer annihilated a battlecruiser conned by a competent, experienced captain?
For several minutes after that, nothing happened. The tension on the bridge grew. Ng distracted herself by reviewing SigInt’s report on the skipmissile attack at Wolakota, but through no fault of Ensign Wychyrski it was basically an expansion of the term “insufficient data” and didn’t hold her attention for long.
Finally a small red pulse of light bloomed near the beacon. Rom-Sanchez’ hand twitched, overlaying it with another cross. The Tenno rippled as data began to build up.
“Signature indicates an Alpha-class. No ID,” Wychyrski reported, scowling at her console as if she could bring the mystery ship in by will.
Nothing more happened for another several minutes, then another emergence pulse blossomed some distance from the destroyer.
“Frigate, possibly a Scorpion. No ID.”
A fierce spark of light bloomed near the destroyer and faded. The faint background chirping of the beacon ceased. Seconds later the destroyer skipped again, moments before the frigate also skipped, emerging in the nearest sunward k-zone about twelve light-minutes in from the beacon’s position.
“No emergence detected for the destroyer.”
The Tenno glyphs flickered uncertainly, blinking through a series of impossible configurations, then settling into a simpler readout that no longer tactically connected the two ships. Ng rubbed her eyes.
“Confirm that, Tactical. Non-coincident light cones?”
“The frigate emerged twenty-two-point-five light-seconds from the beacon. The destroyer skipped eleven-point-two seconds after that.” Rom-Sanchez looked up at her in consternation. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
At that distance, and in that brief time, no communication could have passed between the ships.
“Coincidence,” said Krajno, looking up from his fierce concentration on his console. “They rendezvoused outside the system.”
But why did the destroyer wait, then?
“That may be, but their actions still make no sense,” insisted Rom-Sanchez. “Where’d that destroyer go? Why’d they leave the frigate to watch, rather than the Alpha?” Rom-Sanchez sounded querulous, as if he resented the apparent irrationality of what they had witnessed so far.
They had little time to consider the questions. The Prabu Shiva skipped again less than a minute after seeing the frigate emerge.
“Looks like Harimoto was asking the same questions,” said Krajno. “He waited for the destroyer emergence that didn’t come.” Krajno’s eyes widened, his teeth showing. “Now we wait to see what really happened.”
Her XO’s idea of waiting was a rather active one from the perspective of the bridge crew. Ng tuned out the flurry of reports and consultations. It would be an hour or so, so she turned inward.
What would Nelson have made of this situation? She thought of his long pursuit of Napoleon’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and the later search for Villeneuve before Trafalgar. Amusement flickered briefly at the irony: that an admiral from the age of wooden ships would probably understand her frustration much better than later surface navies, accustomed as they had been to real-time communications.
Still, what would he have made of relativistic tactics, where the order of events depends on where you watch them from? Of being able to watch an action a day and a half after it happened? Or of being able to skip out of a battle, watch your enemy’s tactics again from a different angle, free of battle pressure, then return to the fray with a new plan? Or using the fiveskip to attack the same ship from three different positions simultaneously?
Reluctantly, she abandoned the pleasant fantasy of a conversation with the admiral, showing him her ship, and windowed up her reports queue. End of tour still loomed... battles have an end, good or bad, but paperwork is forever.
Just under an hour later Wychyrski reported the emergence of the Prabhu Shiva a light-minute out from the position of the frigate hiding in the k-zone.
“Long-ranging.” Rom-Sanchez’ voice had roughened with gathering stress. “And the target’s making it easy—it isn’t even drunk-walking.”
The big ship skipped again in seconds. A minute later the reddish spark of an emergence glowed near the position of the frigate.
“He’s less than a light-second from the target,” Rom-Sanchez reported.
“Ruptor signature, modulating to steady-state gravitational activity,” Wychyrski sang out.
“Tractors. He’s got them.”
Less than ten seconds later, another emergence pulse bloomed near the battlecruiser and its victim.
“Emergence, eight light-seconds out. Alpha-class.”
A thin thread of light, visible only as a computer artifact, speared from the destroyer to the battlecruiser. A flare of light grew slowly from the position of the Prabhu Shiva, faded, was gone.
“Give me a close-in replay of that last,” snapped Ng.
The stars fled outward as the image zoomed in. The familiar egg-shape of a battlecruiser appeared, grainy and shimmering with processing artifacts as the computers struggled to create an image across a 38-billion-kilometer gulf. From off screen the chain-of-pearls wake of a skipmissile smote the ship, converting its stern almost instantly to a flaring inferno. Slowly, now turning end over end, the hulk passed out of their field of view.
“SigInt.” Ng’s throat ached. “Can you extract shield status?”
At SigInt, Wychyrski rubbed her eyes, then pulled her hands down with a fierce movement. “No, sir. We’re too far out. But the spectrum of that skipmissile impact is similar to the one we recorded at Wolakota.” She looked back at her console. “Destroyer skipped,” she reported. “Frigate’s still there.”
Rom-Sanchez turned to Ng. “Impossible light cone again.” He gestured at the Tenno glyphs overlaid on the screen, which were pulsing wildly again, cycling through impossible configurations. “The Alpha seemed to know exactly where Prabhu Shiva was.” He hesitated. “As though the frigate summoned it.”
His hands froze above his console, his gaze distant. Then he resumed tapping at his console, more slowly now.
“I’m going to have to purge the tactical computers and sandbox the recent action,” he continued. “They can’t deal with it.” The Tenno lapsed into quiescence. Ng supposed that as a tactician, Rom-Sanchez was having more trouble than most dealing with the apparent relativistic violations they’d witnessed.
Interesting that Wychyrski and Ammant seemed aware of Rom-Sanchez’s abstraction. Then both glanced her way, and snapped back into concentration on their consoles. What was that about?
Never mind. Time to move on.
“Commander, refocus the array on Treymontaigne. We’ll watch what they did next.” That took only moments, across very little more than a degree given their distance from the inner system.
When Treymontaigne swung into view, the planetary Shield was already up, and cis-lunar space was marred with ship-to-ship actions. As they watched, Ng ordered the dispatch of cutters with centrifugal-foil arrays at four-light hour intervals inwards to build up the tactical picture.
The Rifters easily overcame the local defenses, and it was less than an hour later that a destroyer in cis-lunar space fired on the Shield, aiming at the planet’s south polar magnetic pole, where the tesla effect was weakest. Then again, and again, in slow, metronymic rhythm.
Even through the processing artifacts of great distance, Ng could see the auroral excitation flaring with each impact, something that should not have been visible for days.
“SigInt, what’s going on with Treymontaigne’s Shield?”
Wychyrski tapped at her console. “Cross-sensor correlation indicates those impacts are an order of magnitude beyond Alpha specs.” She shook her head, her face a mix of wonder and horror. “Beyond our specs. At that energy level, the Shield would have held out about eight hours, maybe less.”
Ng drummed her fingers on one of the pod arms, staring at the screen. She felt Krajno’s gaze on her, and wondered if he was feeling the same sort of relief that she did. Given skipmissiles that powerful, there was no reason to think Harimoto had failed to raise his shields. The pieces of the puzzle began to assemble themselves in her mind even as she issued her next orders.
“Tactical, prepare a digest of the action with Prabhu Shiva. SigInt, Communications, keep the array on Treymontaigne and feed Tactical whatever correlates you can add. Get it to us in the plot room.” She tapped at her com tabs.
“Engineering, GPT Addison,” came the response.
“Have Commander Totokili report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
Another tap.
“Armory. Navaz here.”
“Lieutenant Commander Navaz, please report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
Another tap. The tab flared blue: boswell access. “Lieutenant Commander Nilotis,” came the response, with the flatness of neural induction.
“Please report to the plot room.”
“AyKay, Captain.”
She stood up.
“Commander, please join me in the plot room. Navigation, you have the deck.”
o0o
Rom-Sanchez barely noticed as the captain and XO left the bridge. He’d already run the anomalous data through the Tenno again, with the same results. The coordinated action of the two Rifter vessels was impossible.
But so was the destruction of Shiva by a single shot from an obsolete destroyer, not to mention the impossible battering they were watching Treymontaigne endure.
“…sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Nausea twinged as he remembered that awful story from Lost Earth, whose surreal plot had greatly disturbed him as a child. Even then he’d known a story had to make sense, and for him that’s what Tactical was all about: making sense of a story whose plot was coming at you way too fast. Like now.
Well, I’m only being asked to believe two impossible things, and I’ve already had breakfast. His mood veered wildly between laughter and excitement and... terror.
Three impossible things. The third was that a game would be the making or breaking of his career, and possibly of everyone else who’d defiantly adopted the derisive sobriquet of “L-5 Loonies” bestowed on those who’d found Nefalani Warrigal’s strange version of Phalanx so compelling.
He looked up. Wychyrski and Ammant—the only other members of the Loonies on the bridge, who stared back at him with what he suspected was a mirror image of his own excitement and terror. He tapped his console to bozlink the three of them together, a necessary preliminary in any case, to prepare the digest ordered by the captain. But what he said launched them into uncharted territory.
(You could parse those ship actions in some of Warrigal’s scenarios.)
(We have,) came Ammant’s boswelled voice on top of Wychyrski’s (Too bad Warrigal isn’t here.)
The excitement hardened to resolution. They’d seen it, too.
(She will be,) said Rom-Sanchez. Before either could reply, he turned towards the navigator and spoke in formal cadence. “Lieutenant Mzinga. Request permission to bring Ensign Warrigal to the bridge for consultation on the digest ordered by the captain.”
The quiet background murmur of the other crewmembers at their consoles ceased abruptly.
The older officer regarded him gravely. Mzinga had never joined in the joking about L-5, and had even quietly watched a game several months back, before declining to participate.
“You sure about that, Lieutenant?”
Rom-Sanchez took a deep breath. Would his bars have time to tarnish, or was he about to terminate his career? He glanced again at the subscreen replaying the fatal attack on Prabhu Shiva. It didn’t matter. Duty left him no choice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Permission granted.” One corner of Mzinga’s mouth twitched slightly. “When you and she are finished, best you two take the report to the captain in person. Petty Officer Dimones can take your console.”
“AyKay, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Well, now he was committed. Rom-Sanchez tapped up a comlink to Warrigal, wondering if she’d thank him for this.