The battle of Devastation reef hw-3 Page 35

  After the usual Red Cross preamble-name, rank, serial number, followed by a certificate from the Hammers asserting the authenticity of the vidmail and giving her prisoner identity number-Anna’s face popped into his neuronics. For a moment she said nothing. She seemed tired: skin washed out to a dull beige, gray bags under her eyes, her face stretched taut across high cheekbones no longer dusted with pink. But her eyes were pure Anna: an extraordinary green, alive and alert. Michael forced himself to relax. Anna was as well as any Fed could be in Hammer captivity.

  “You can start,” a disembodied voice said. “You have one minute.”

  A shiver ran up Michael’s spine. The accent was pure unadulterated Hammer. The flattened vowels, chopped syllables, and staccato delivery triggered a feeling of sick dread and a flood of memories he had worked long and hard to bury.

  Anna stared directly into the holocam. “Michael,” she said, her voice steady and controlled, “I don’t have long. As you can see, I’m okay. I had some splinter damage to my right leg, but nothing serious. The Hammer medics did a good job, it’s healing well, and I now have a wound stripe. I’m not allowed to tell you where we are, but we are all safe. The loss of the ship was heartbreaking and probably the most … uh”-blinking, Anna’s eyes filled with tears-“ah, shit … it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through. I really didn’t think I’d make it. Now I know how you felt when your ship went. It was horrible. Anyway, we did the interrogation thing, I told the bastar-”

  “Watch it,” the unseen Hammer growled.

  “Sorry,” Anna said, sounding anything but. “We’re in a prison camp; I can’t say where. It’s basic but enough to get by. We’re out of the rain, we get fed, and the Hammers have done the right thing by us so far. There are prisoners from other ships in this camp, so there is no shortage of advice on how to survive. The senior officer is a four-ringer. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone, so discipline is tight. If I behave, I’m allowed one of these messages a month, so I’ll talk to you again. You can vidmail me whenever you like. Haven’t had any from you yet, so I don’t know if we’ll get them, but don’t let that stop you from trying. Okay, have to go. Love you. Bye.”

  Anna’s face vanished, and that was it. Michael did not know what to think; his mind seethed, a mess of mixed emotions: relief, anger, longing, and frustration, all overlaid by a blanket of raw hatred of all things Hammer. The rush of emotion triggered by Anna’s vidmail was so strong, he had to force himself to push her out of his mind.

  Ten minutes later, he was back in control enough to open the second message. “About bloody time,” he said as he scanned it a second time to make sure he had read it right. After waiting what seemed like a lifetime, he was to get his chance to present his account of Operation Opera to the board of inquiry.

  Back in his cabin that evening, Michael watched Anna’s vidmail so many times that he could recite it word for word. He could not get enough of her. He watched it one more time; something nagged at him, and for the life of him, he could not put a finger on it. Becoming more and more frustrated, he watched it over and over again. He still did not get it, but there was something there. Problem was, his subconscious knew what it was but refused to let it out into the open. Michael gave up.

  He would have another go at it after he had taken a shower and grabbed something to eat.

  Shortly before midnight, it came to him. When it did, Anna’s ingenuity left him stunned. Throughout her vidmail she blinked, but never both eyes at once. It took him a long time to understand what she was saying, but once he worked it out, it turned out to be simple. An almost imperceptible twitch of her left eyelid meant 0, a twitch of her right meant 1, generating numbers between 0 and 9. Reversing things produced numbers between 0 and 15, which wasn’t helpful; Anna was always one to keep things simple.

  So, thirty-two twitches gave him a sequence of binary numbers: 0001 0000 0101 0000 0101 0010 0000 1001. He shook his head in disbelief. Only a love-struck idiot would have picked it, and he was one of those; Michael was sure he was the one person in all of humanspace who would have spotted what she was doing. One of the fancier pattern recognition AIs might have cracked it, but who would have bothered?

  He had a new problem. Converting the string of binary numbers to base 10 was the obvious next step; that gave him 10505209. But the longer he looked at it, the less sense it made. He was baffled. What the hell did it mean? After hours of trying, he gave up. He was getting nowhere. It was time to get some expert help, he decided.

  He commed the duty intelligence officer.

  Thursday, May 10, 2401, UD

  Conference Room 10, Space Fleet headquarters

  Foundation, Terranova

  The president of the board of inquiry, Captain Shavetz, a warfare officer with a combat record a kilometer long and medals to match, sat flanked by officers from every major specialization in the Fleet. He watched Michael take his seat.

  “Lieutenant Helfort. Do I need to remind you that the oath you swore on accepting your commission as an officer in the Federated Worlds Space Fleet requires you to tell the truth at all times?”

  “No, sir,” Michael said, “you do not.”

  “Thank you. The board has studied your report of proceedings carefully. It has reviewed your report in light of statements from the Reckless’s crew and those of spacers from other ships together with the reports of proceedings and datalogs from the ships of the dreadnought force and the rest of Battle Fleet Lima. I have to say that your report is entirely consistent with those latter sources of information, a view that is supported by the AIs analyzing the evidence”-get on with it, for chrissakes, Michael said to himself, fuming; the way the man talked, no wonder the board of inquiry took so long-“but we have a number of issues which require some clarification.”

  “Yes, sir.” Michael replied woodenly.

  “Good,” Shavetz said. He turned to a young warfare officer sitting to his left, the junior member of the board. Michael knew him only by reputation: a hotshot navigator, massively ambitious, and probably no friend of dreadnoughts. “Lieutenant Commander Grivaz?”

  “Thank you, sir. Lieutenant Helfort, I have two questions. First, when Reckless deployed for Operation Opera, what did you understand that operation’s primary military objective to be? Second, and please be precise when answering, why did you think that?”

  “Well, sir …”

  Late into the evening of a long day, Captain Shavetz glanced at each of the members of the board in turn. “Are there any more questions for Lieutenant Helfort … no? Good.”

  He turned to Michael. “Lieutenant Helfort. I think that is all. Thank you. The board secretary will advise you if we need to talk to you again. You are dismissed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Michael struggled out of his seat. It had been a tough day, one of searching examination interrupted only by a short lunch break. The process had wrung him out. One after another the questions came. They never stopped, the pressure intense, the pace relentless. Not that any of that bothered him; telling things the way they happened was easy. What bothered him was the fact that even after hours of unremitting scrutiny, he had no idea what the board was really thinking.

  Michael hoped they saw things his way. His future depended on it. When he limped out of the room, a chief petty officer stood in his way.

  “Lieutenant Helfort?” the man asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Chief Tarkasian, sir. Vice Admiral Prentice’s compliments. She appreciates that it’s late in the day but wonders if you might spare her ten minutes.”

  What on earth? Michael wondered. “Vice Admiral Prentice? Yes, of course. Now?”

  “I really think that might be best, sir,” Tarkasian said.

  Michael nodded. “Lead on, chief.”

  Tarkasian was right: Late in the day or not, junior officers were well advised to treat requests from senior officers, however politely phrased, as direct orders. He limped after the man, wondering
what the Fleet’s director of intelligence wanted. It was something to do with Anna’s mysterious binary code message, of course, but what?

  Five minutes later, they arrived at Prentice’s office. He was shown straight in. Prentice-a severe-looking woman with thick black hair pulled back tight from an austere, angular face, penetrating brown eyes, and a fearsome reputation as one of Fleet’s toughest and smartest officers, a woman for whom fools were to be stomped into the dirt-waved him into a seat in front of her desk. Almost immediately, a captain arrived, dropping into the seat alongside Michael’s.

  “Lieutenant Helfort. Welcome. We’ve never met. I’m Admiral Prentice. This is my chief of staff, Captain Cissokho.”

  “Sirs.”

  “I know this is important to you, so I thought it best if we talked face-to-face. Besides,” Prentice said with a fleeting smile, “I wanted to meet the man who pulled the Federation’s ass out of the fire. Opera would have been a complete dud without you, so well done.” Her smile broadened. “Just don’t tell anybody I said so. I’m unpopular enough as it is.”

  Surprised, Michael blinked. “Thank you, sir. That means a lot, more than you know.”

  Prentice waved a hand. “It’s nothing less than you deserve. Now, to business. Bill?’

  “Admiral,” Cissokho said. He turned to Michael. “We followed up your analysis of Lieutenant Cheung’s vidmail. You were right. She had encoded a binary message. Extremely clever of her, I must say, and equally clever of you to work it out. Anyway, it translated to 10505209. Of course, that begs the question. What does a string of eight numbers mean? It took one of my analysts a while, but I think she’s cracked it. Here, have a look.”

  A map of the Hammer’s home planet, Commitment, appeared on the admiral’s wall-mounted holovid. Cissokho stabbed a marker at a point southeast of the capital, McNair. “10 degrees south, 50 degrees west is more or less where Camp J-5209 sits. That’s where the survivors from the Damishqui are. It’s the only place that fits the numbers 10505209. All the other options are either in the sea or have nothing that fits the last four numbers. It’s a new camp, so we’ve only seen it referenced in intercepts of low-grade administrative traffic. We don’t have recon vid of it, but now that we know where it is, we will. I’ll let you know when it’s been uploaded to the Fleet knowledge base.”

  “I’ll be damned, sir,” Michael said. “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “Wish it was something more exciting, but you never know. The information might come in handy one day. The Hammers never tell us where they keep our prisoners.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Happy to help,” the admiral said. “We’ll keep an eye on things. If we hear anything about Camp J-5209, provided we can release it, of course, we’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you both.”

  Michael walked away from the admiral’s office feeling better than he had in a while, his body reenergized, and not just because he knew where the Hammers had imprisoned Anna. That was part of it, to be sure, but as important was the realization that despite the overt hostility expressed by the overwhelming majority of Fleet officers and the unremitting hammering he was getting from the trashpress, there were people-important people-both sympathetic and supportive.

  Knowing he was not alone made a difference.

  Friday, May 25, 2401, UD

  Warfare Division, Space Fleet headquarters

  Foundation, Terranova

  “Helfort?”

  Michael glanced up from his work. It was his immediate boss. Of all the people in the Warfare Division, she was without doubt the most hostile; the woman was a festering mass of ill-concealed resentment.

  “Yes, sir?

  “The board of inquiry is about to release the unclassified summary of its report into Operation Opera. The director wants you to be there. Conference-5 at 10:00.”

  Without waiting for a response, the woman turned and left. “Thank you, sir,” Michael said to her back. “Thank you so much.”

  The woman spun around. “Don’t push your luck,” she hissed, her voice dripping with venom. “It’s time you got what’s coming to you, Helfort. Conference-5 at 10:00 and don’t be late.” She started to turn away but stopped, her mouth slashed into a malicious sneer. “Oh, yes. One more thing. You might be interested to know that the provost marshal has been told to be there, too. So I wouldn’t make any plans for tonight if I were you.”

  “Fucking cow,” Michael mouthed at her retreating back, stifling an urge to rip his legbot off and hurl it at her head.

  He sat unmoving, acid burning a path from his stomach up into his chest. Shit, he said to himself, finally.

  The president of the board of inquiry waited patiently until the conference room, every seat taken, fell silent. Michael waited until the last minute before slipping in unseen, sitting as always at the back, well clear of the large contingent of Fleet brass that filled the front rows of the conference room, lines of black and gold flanked on both sides by holocam-wielding members of the press.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Captain Shavetz said, “and thank you all for coming. I am about to release our report on Operation Opera, the successful operation to destroy the Hammers’ antimatter plant at Devastation Reef. The report is extremely detailed, so in deference to our friends in the press”-a subdued laugh greeted this remark; Fleet had few friends in the press, and everybody knew it-“we will present our finding of facts, a summary of what happened during Operation Opera, followed by the conclusions the board has drawn from the evidence presented to us. Our recommendations will follow this afternoon. To answer a question which I know will be asked, yes, every board member has agreed on the statement of facts, conclusions, and recommendations of this board. There is no dissenting minority report. However, one thing must be understood. We are still at war with the Hammer Worlds, so for reasons of operational security, we cannot release our report in its entirety. Some findings of fact and some of our conclusions and recommendations are classified. I’m-”

  “Pantini, World News,” a voice barked from the media pack. Michael shook his head. Who else but Giorgio Pantini? Why did the man bother asking questions? His often stated commitment to factually based reporting was, as one commentator so memorably put it, “a shoddy cover over a stinking pot of lies.” After all Pantini had said about him, Michael had no problem endorsing that judgment.

  “Yes?” Shavetz said, looking warily at Pantini.

  “So, Captain Shavetz,” Pantini said, “you’re saying we can expect another Fleet cover-up.”

  “Come, come, come, Mister Pantini,” Shavetz said with exaggerated deference, “that’s hardly a question. That’s a statement, and you know it. If you have a worthwhile question, please ask it, though I fail to see how you can have considering we haven’t actually said anything yet. Otherwise, please resume your seat. We have a lot to get through.”

  Pantini’s response died stillborn, his protests drowned out by a chorus of less than friendly encouragement to sit down and shut up, which Pantini did with petulant bad grace.

  “As I was saying,” Shavetz said, “for reasons of operational security, we cannot release our report in its entirety, and I hope you will bear with us on that. But I can assure you we have released all we can. More important, we have held back nothing that compromises the overall thrust of that report in any way. I would like to start with a summary of the key events drawn from the board’s findings of fact. Lieutenant Commander Grivaz?”

  “Thank you, sir. If you would turn your attention to the holovid behind me, I will start at the point where Opera was in its initial planning stages. In late January, the chief of the defense force, Admiral Kefu, hosted a planning conference. The objectives of this meeting were several, but the most important of them was …”

  His voice calm and dispassionate throughout, Grivaz took more than two hours to map out the tortuous, tangled paths leading to the destruction of the Hammer’s antimatter plant. Utterly absorbed, M
ichael followed his every word, scrutinizing everything the man said for some clue, some hint to the board’s thinking. But Grivaz was either a consummate professional or well rehearsed-probably both, Michael decided on reflection-so by the time he finished, Michael knew a lot more about Opera and nothing more about his prospects. He did not enjoy Grivaz’s dispassionate reconstruction of his clash with Perkins. As presented, it sounded utterly damning. Michael was not surprised. Grivaz could talk until the cows came home, and nothing he ever said would convey to the people in the room the raw terror of that awful moment when he realized he had to defy Perkins’s order, that he risked the entire Federated Worlds. Even those who knew what it was like to be in combat, to be one bad decision-or one bad break-away from death, would never understand what he had gone through.

  “Thank you, Commander,” Shavetz said when Grivaz finished. “We’ll pause for lunch now. We will start again at 13:00 sharp, so please be back here promptly. I will not wait for anyone. Not even you, Mister Pantini.”

  Pantini scowled when the room erupted in laughter.

  Michael had no intention of joining the crowd heading for lunch: too many people asking too many questions he did not want to answer. He waited, content to hang back before slipping out to get something to eat.

  He did not get the chance. To his dismay, Giorgio Pantini cut his way through the throng toward him, holocam operator close behind. For a moment, Michael toyed with the idea of making a quick break for it before common sense told him that would just make him look guilty. Stitching a look of polite interest onto his face, he waited for Pantini, sending out an urgent com for one of Fleet’s PR hacks to come save him.

  “Mister Pantini. Good afternoon. Can I help you?” he said, his voice loaded with confidence he did not feel, the apprehension busy turning his stomach over well concealed.

  “Yes, you can,” Pantini said, his tone openly belligerent. “Tell me this, Lieutenant Helfort. This morning, we saw clear evidence, unarguable evidence, that you disobeyed the direct order of a flag officer during combat. Do you agree you disobeyed Rear Admiral Perkins’s order?”