CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Citizen Captain Oliver Diamato punched the button to adjust the captain's chair on the bridge of the brand-new battlecruiser PNS William T. Sherman. The chair assumed the angle he wanted (or, rather, that his aching back and shoulder demanded in the wake of yet another physical therapy session), and he swiveled in a slow circle to contemplate his new domain.

In some respects, he rather regretted being elevated to his new rank and given his splendid, shiny toy. Not that he was tempted to give it back. Navies, even revolutionary ones, tended to agree that an officer who felt he was incapable of command was undoubtedly right. That being so, his superiors wouldn't dream of arguing with him... or ever offering him a command, or any other worthwhile duty, again. There were probably some exceptions to the rule, but Diamato couldn't think of a single one.

Besides, he knew Sherman was a sign the Navy in general, or at least Citizen Secretary McQueen in particular, approved of him, and he was honest enough to admit that his own ambition was gratified by it. But he remembered his own last captain, and he knew he still had a long, long way to go before he could hope to match Citizen Captain Hall's worthiness to command a warship in the Republic's defense.

He was good, with a better technical background than usual in the People's Navy and a natural gift for tactics. He fell short of Citizen Captain Hall's stature as a tactician, but Citizen Captain Hall had been a natural herself, one who'd spent decades honing her inborn talents, and she'd showed him the way to hone his own. He would miss her tutelage, but she'd given him the critical guidance which would let him someday match her ability as a tactician.

He knew that, too. But he also knew that when it came to motivating a crew, to melding the individuals of its human material into one finely whetted weapon, he fell even further short of her stature. Mostly, he told himself as honestly as he could, because, like so many of the PN's officers, he'd been forced up the rank ladder too quickly by the joint pressures of internal revolution and external war. He simply hadn't had time to amass the experience Joanne Hall had amassed... and she had not had sufficient time to pass that experience along to him, although God knew she'd tried in the time she'd had!

But because he was self-honest, Diamato also admitted doubt he ever would have that magic touch. He hoped, someday, to learn to imitate it well enough that others would be impressed by his command presence, but he would never have that... something. That ability to reach out to her subordinates even as she clung to all the old, outmoded, elitist formalities of naval command, ignoring all of the egalitarian changes which the New Order had wrought, and inspire them to follow her straight into the fire.

Of course, that may be because not all of those "outmoded" formalities and concepts are quite so outmoded after all, Diamato thought very quietly, in a hidden corner of his mind, and carefully did not glance at the man standing beside his command chair. It wouldn't do to let Citizen Commissioner Rhodes know what dangerous, counter-revolutionary ideas might be flowing through his brain. On the other hand, Rhodes might yet turn out to be another Citizen Commissioner Addison and actually end up supporting a more traditional discipline structure aboard Sherman, much as Addison had for Citizen Captain Hall. The problem was that he hadn't yet given any indication that he might, and Diamato dared not come right out and ask.

Which was the final reason the citizen captain was less than completely delighted with his own promotion and new ship, for command of one of the People's battlecruisers was not the best imaginable job for someone whose faith in the Revolution — or its leaders, at least — had taken a pounding in the eighteen months since Operation Icarus.

It wasn't something Diamato allowed himself to contemplate often, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, but it was there. Indeed, it was the reason he hadn't been more aggressive in sounding out Rhodes' attitudes. And try though he might, Diamato still couldn't eradicate the festering doubt that haunted him.

Nothing had happened to change his commitment to the ideals officially espoused by the Committee of Public Safety. Or, for that matter, his sense of personal loyalty to Citizen Chairman Pierre. But he'd discovered too much about the empire building, and the mutual suspicion and hostile camps, which divided the people who should have been the New Order's paladins. And he'd seen too much — too terribly, ghastly much — of what that empire building could cost.

He closed his eyes and shuddered again as he recalled the dreadful final phase of the Hancock attack. Citizen Admiral Kellet had been killed early in the action, but her second-in-command, Citizen Rear Admiral Porter, had been a near total incompetent. Worse, though Diamato hadn't realized it before the battle, he'd also been a coward. Yet the citizen rear admiral had possessed impeccable political credentials and enjoyed patronage from the highest levels. In fact, although Diamato had not been able to confirm it, the citizen captain had picked up strong hints that Porter's most powerful patron had probably been Oscar Saint-Just himself.

That sort of direct connection between a member of the Committee of Public Safety and an officer of the People's Navy, while uncommon, wasn't exactly unheard of. That was especially true among the Navy's higher ranks, and everyone knew it. Before Icarus, even Diamato would have endorsed the necessity, or at the least the propriety, of such arrangements. It was (or ought to be) only fitting for the civilian leaders charged with directing the People's struggle at the highest level to support the careers of those they felt were best suited to leading that struggle in open battle. And if a member of the Committee believed an officer was both capable and loyal, then it only made sense to see to it that such a person was put where he could do the most good in the People's struggle.

The problem was that by any standard, except his loyalty to the Committee of Public Safety (or, at least, to Oscar Saint-Just), Porter had been utterly unqualified to command anything more important than a garbage scow... on its way to the breakers. It was always possible Diamato was being too harsh on the dead officer, and he attempted, from time to time, to make himself grant that possibility. But Citizen Admiral Kellet and Citizen Captain Hall had clearly considered Porter an incompetent, and even Citizen Commissioner Addison had shared their view. If he hadn't, he wouldn't have supported Citizen Captain Hall when she pretended Kellet was still alive and issuing the orders that actually came from Hall rather than passing command to Porter as regulations required.

That was one incident from the Second Battle of Hancock which Diamato had not included in any of his reports, and he doubted either of the other two survivors from PNS Schaumberg's command deck had volunteered it either. Both of them were petty officers, not commissioned, and no doubt they both felt it was safer to let sleeping dogs lie, but in Diamato's case there had been an added incentive in the form of a direct, personal hint from no less than Citizen Secretary McQueen herself.

Diamato had heard the rumors about McQueen's ambition. What was more, he suspected those rumors were true. Yet not even that had been enough to immunize him against her personal charisma. And even if it had been, her sheer competence, and the fact that she was obviously a voice of sanity — and, he'd come to fear, an isolated voice — on the Committee of Public Safety would probably have silenced any qualms.

When it came right down to it, Diamato felt certain McQueen was the only member of the Committee who believed a word he'd said about the LACs which had massacred TF 12.3. Worse, he hadn't been as surprised to discover that fact as he should have been. To be sure, the lack of any but the most fragmentary sensor data, plus the fact that he had been unable to make any coherent report for weeks, had undoubtedly contributed to the skeptics' rejection of the idea. But there were other factors.

For one thing, that incompetent, cowardly, self-serving, panic stricken, gutless idiot Porter had thrown away all Citizen Captain Hall had died to achieve with a single, unforgivably stupid order. The Manties had been about to break off. Diamato knew they had, knew their mounting losses, inflicted, in no small part, by one Oliver Diamato and PNS Schaumberg, had finally convinced them there was no point in continuing to smash headlong into the shattered task force's massed defenses. Task Force 12.3 had been crushed, driven off in defeat, but if its offensive capability had been shattered, its defensive firepower had remained formidable. There was absolutely no reason for anything as fragile as LACs — even those LACs — to keep expending themselves harrying an obviously broken foe when that foes' units retained enough mutually supporting defensive fire to kill their attackers if they persisted in closing for kills of their own.

Citizen Captain Hall's iron-nerved tactical command had brought that about. She'd saved the majority of TF 12.3's battleships, gotten them (and all the people aboard them) to the very threshold of safety — battered, bleeding, and desperate, but alive — before what Diamato knew would have been the Manties' last massed attack broke through to savage Schaumberg's bridge and kill her.

With her death, and Citizen Commissioner Addision's, Diamato had had no option but to pass command to Porter. To be honest, he'd never even considered not passing it... but he should have. Oh, yes. He should have, and he cursed himself after each night's nightmares for failing to.

His jaw clamped as he recalled Porter's incredulous, panic-stricken response to the news that he was now in command. And his jaw clamped tighter still as his memory replayed the citizen admiral's frantic order for the task force to scatter and proceed independently for the hyper limit.

That order had been an act of suicide. One which had, unfortunately, killed thousands of people besides the single, incompetent political appointee it damned well ought to have killed.

Diamato doubted the Manties had been able to believe their good fortune as the tight formation to which Citizen Captain Hall had clung so tenaciously abruptly disintegrated into individual units. Yet worse even than the physical separation which had opened vulnerable chinks in the umbrella of the battleships' defensive fire had been the panic Porter had communicated to his captains. Even the most levelheaded of them had realized their commanding officer lacked the first clue as to what to do and that any hope of their own ships' survival lay in their own, individual efforts. Those whose nerve had been worst shaken before the scatter order had lost their courage completely and concentrated solely on putting the greatest possible distance between themselves and the enemy.

And when the formation unraveled, the Manty LACs which had just turned away instantly reversed acceleration and bored in for the kill.

Diamato remembered the unending succession of disasters, the helplessness with which he had watched other battleships being clawed down, blown apart by those incredible LACs' impossible grasers or — possibly even worse — fired into just until they lost an alpha node or two. With even one alpha node down, it was impossible to generate a Warshawski sail, and Hancock lay directly in the path of a grav wave. Which meant no one without Warshawski sails could maneuver in hyper at all... and that, in turn, meant there would be no escape from the vengefully pursuing Manty superdreadnoughts of the system's inner picket. The SDs could cross the hyper wall and maneuver freely, which meant they would run the battleships down with absurd ease no matter what normal-space velocity they might have attained, and once a true ship of the wall brought a mere battleship to action, there could be only one outcome.

Whenever their sensors told them a Republican ship had lost an alpha node, the LACs instantly dropped their attacks on her, swinging away to go after one of her sisters who could still run, and the gaps opening between the battleships as they obeyed Porter's order had made the Manties' murderous task immeasurably simpler.

When they finally got back around to Schaumberg, the battleship had been as completely on her own as any of the others. Diamato had done his best, and that best had included killing two more LACs, but his ship's own damage had already been too great for a truly effective defense. A single screaming pass had crippled Schaumberg's Warshawski sails. A second had scored yet another hit on the battleship's command deck and ended Citizen Commander Oliver Diamato's participation in the Second Battle of Hancock with brutal finality.

He was alive, he knew, only because the savagely wounded heavy cruiser Poignard had been close enough, and her skipper, Citizen Captain Stevens, had been gutsy enough to close with Schaumberg's crippled wreck right at the hyper limit. Poignard had come alongside long enough to take off the battleship's worst injured (including an unconscious Oliver Diamato) before making her own alpha translation. Very little of the cruiser had been left, aside from her hyper generator and Warshawski sails, but that had been enough for her to run.

Schaumberg, with three alpha nodes shot out, had been less fortunate. Citizen Lieutenant Commander Kantor, her assistant engineer, had become her senior officer when Diamato went down, and, according to Stevens' after-action report, he'd believed there was at least a chance he could get his damaged nodes back on-line before the Manties caught up with him.

Obviously, Kantor had been wrong. Six of Citizen Admiral Kellet's thirty-three battleships had trickled home after the battle; PNS Schaumberg had not been one of them. Nor had Porter's flagship, Admiral Quinterra. And those which had made it out had been so mauled that much of their tracking data had been either lost completely or scrambled beyond recovery.

Even so, it should have been possible for the Board of Inquiry to have formed some proper conclusions about what TF 12.3 had run into. Diamato had been too badly injured to be called as a witness, but the tactical officers aboard the handful of surviving ships had to have seen what had happened, and their reports about the new LACs and the godawful missiles which had come screaming up the task force's wake just as the LACs attacked ought to have alerted the Navy that it faced a new, deadly threat.

Except that Citizen Admiral Porter's patrons had demanded (and gotten) a report which avoided the scathing posthumous condemnation Porter's stupidity so amply deserved. Diamato was no longer so innocent as to believe they'd done so to protect Porter's reputation. Nor did he believe, as some people pretended to, that it was because Operation Icarus' success was too important to civilian and Navy morale to allow any hint that its success had been less than total tarnish it in the People's eyes. No, he'd seen enough by now to know it had been their own reputations and the dismal depths of their misjudgment in having supported and nourished the career of such an incompetent that Porter's patrons had been protecting. But it hadn't mattered. The only way to protect the admiral, and thus themselves, had been to suppress the entire inquiry, because any accurate report would have been a blistering indictment of Porter's ineptitude and cowardice.

And Diamato's surviving fellow tac officers had taken the unveiled, threatening hint. They'd volunteered nothing when they faced the Board, and their responses to the questions the Board's members had asked had been limited to an absolute, self-protecting minimum. Furious as he'd been when he heard about it later, Diamato could scarcely blame them. Not a one of them had been above the rank of citizen lieutenant commander, and the board members, the most junior of them a citizen rear admiral, had been even more careful about the questions they'd asked (or hadn't) than the tac officers had been about how they'd answered.

And the whole thing had been conducted with unseemly haste, as well, as if all involved were ashamed and wanted it over and forgotten as quickly as possible. By the time Diamato emerged from the hospital, the deed was done, the report was written, and no one wanted to hear from one furious, heartbroken, embittered citizen commander.

He'd tried to tell them anyway, driven by his agonizing need to discharge his duty as an officer... and to atone for his failure to fulfill Citizen Captain Hall's dying plea to get her people home. She'd counted on him for that, clung to life to charge him with their safety literally with her dying breath. She'd trusted him to get them out... and he hadn't. It wasn't his fault, and he knew it, just as he knew whose fault it had been, but that did nothing to silence the demons of conscience when they came to him in his dreams.

And so, even knowing it was futile, he'd mounted his singlehanded effort to storm the battlements of the official, politically imposed whitewash. He'd filed reports, and they'd been set aside unread. He'd demanded to be heard, and been turned down by his immediate superiors. He'd drafted a personal letter to the commander of the Capital Fleet, and it had been returned unread (officially) with a terse note reminding him that the inquiry had been completed... and that no further communications on the subject were desired or would be received. The warning had been clear, but duty and guilt had refused to accept it. Unable to stop, he'd prepared to go as far up the ladder as it took, a move which undoubtedly would have ended with his own destruction, except for Citizen Secretary McQueen.

He didn't know how the Citizen Secretary of War had heard about his hopeless crusade, but she'd personally summoned him to her office, and in the presence of Ivan Bukato, the senior uniformed officer of the People's Navy, listened to every word he'd had to say. And unlike the Board of Inquiry, she and Bukato had asked incisive, probing questions. Indeed, they'd managed to wring things out of him that he hadn't even realized he knew, although the lack of hard scan data or tac recordings to support his recollections had limited the reliance which could be placed upon them. At the end, McQueen had sent him to an office at the Octagon and had him write out a fresh, formal report for her eyes only.

Diamato had sensed McQueen's initial dislike for him. Only later had he realized that it resulted from the fact that she'd perused his personnel jacket before the interview and that, in the process, she must have come across the StateSec evaluations which no doubt stressed his loyalty to the New Order. She must have feared he was another Porter in the making, seeking to curry the sort of patronage which had allowed that incompetent to kill so many thousands of his fellow Navy personnel. It would have been stupid of Diamato to seek it by deliberately antagonizing the people who'd supported Porter, but it must also have seemed possible to her that he was too naive or too foolish to realize that was what he was doing. She might even have believed that he thought the whitewash had been the Navy's idea, and that he viewed attacking it as a way to win the approval of the Navy's StateSec watchdogs.

But his outrage and determination to get the truth across had been enough to erase her dislike. If he'd needed any proof of that, the assignment to command Sherman while his rehab therapy was still considerably short of complete would have wiped them away. Perhaps even more to the point had been the way in which she'd urged him, without ever explicitly saying so, to abate his charge at the windmill of the Hancock whitewash. It had been weeks before he discovered what had actually produced that report... and realized McQueen's veiled warning was probably all that had prevented his disappearance as "an enemy of the People." After all, if Porter's patrons were prepared to go as far as suppressing critically important tactical data to protect themselves, they were undoubtedly capable of using the full power of State Security and a set of trumped-up charges to eliminate a single, troublesome citizen commander.

So instead of being disappeared, here he sat on the bridge of his splendid new ship, watching on the tactical display as the other units of a new task force gathered for a fresh offensive against the Manties. It was a proud moment, as well it ought to have been, but he could not suppress a shiver whenever he remembered the blazing madness of Second Hancock.

At least Citizen Vice Admiral Tourville had shown an interest in what Diamato could tell him about the battle. Diamato had been rather more circumspect than he had in his conversation with McQueen, but he'd gotten the essentials across, and Tourville had listened. Nor had he scoffed, although he hadn't exactly announced that he believed them. And Diamato had no idea whether or not Tourville had passed that information further up Twelfth Fleet's chain of command. He hoped the citizen vice admiral had, but all he knew for certain was that he had never been invited aboard the superdreadnought Salamis to recount his experiences for Citizen Admiral Giscard. Obedient to McQueen's warnings, he hadn't spontaneously volunteered them at any of the conferences he'd attended, either. He was, after all, a very new citizen captain in command of his very first starship. Even though the starship in question was one of the PN's newest, most powerful battlecruisers, he remained one of the junior men on Twelfth Fleet's totem pole, and his betters would tell him when they wanted to hear from him.

But he hoped — oh, how he hoped!—that Tourville had believed him... and that Giscard had seen the report he'd written for Citizen Secretary McQueen and read it very, very carefully.

"All right, citizens." Citizen Admiral Javier Giscard pinched the bridge of his nose in an unconscious effort to ease his fatigue, then looked around the briefing room table. Only six officers — and, of course, their people's commissioners — were present, including himself, and he smiled tiredly at the others as he asked, "Are there any questions or points we need to consider before we get to the main reason for this briefing?"

"I'm sure there must be," Lester Tourville replied, mustache bristling as he returned Giscard's smile with a much fiercer one of his own. "Unfortunately, I'm not sure what they might be. BJ?"

He looked across the table at Citizen Vice Admiral John Groenewold, known to his intimates as "BJ," and flicked one hand in a questioning gesture. Groenewold was the newest member of Twelfth Fleet's senior command team, replacing Citizen Vice Admiral Shallus, who had been recalled to Haven to serve as Citizen Admiral Bukato's deputy at the Octagon. An intense, dark-complexioned officer, Groenewold had a reputation for aggressiveness in action which almost matched that of Tourville himself, and the two men had known one another for years.

"I guess my only real question is whether or not we should be putting much stock in the rumors of new Manty secret weapons," Groenewold said, and Tourville hid a wince. Trust his old friend to jump right in with both feet, he reflected. BJ never had been known for his tact, but Tourville had hoped he'd at least become sensitive enough to political realities not to charge blindly into a minefield like the Hancock Board's report. Or not, at least, in front of witnesses.

Tourville glanced at Everard Honeker's profile from the corner of his eye. Honeker seemed no more than politely attentive, with no indication that he might consider Groenewold's question the slightest out of line. Groenewold's commissioner, Citizen Commissioner Lasrina O'Faolain, was a bit more demonstrative. Her mouth tightened, and the corners of her eyes quivered, as if she'd been forced to override a reflex to close them in resignation, but she seemed almost more apprehensive for her charge's sake than angry at him for broaching the forbidden.

Which left Citizen Admiral Giscard's people's commissioner, and Tourville couldn't prevent himself from turning to look in her direction. Citizen Commissioner Eloise Pritchart had a short way with enemies of the People, and there were rumors that her icy, perpetually controlled exterior was a mask for a very different internal personality — one which hunted down the People's foes with a zealot's vengeful passion. Whatever the truth of those rumors, it was well known that Pritchart stood high in the esteem of Oscar Saint-Just, who had personally picked her to ride herd on Giscard. And since certain other persistent rumors insisted that the late, unlamented Citizen Admiral Porter's personal patron had been that same Oscar Saint-Just...

"I'm not sure exactly what you mean by `putting stock' in them, Citizen Admiral," Giscard said after only the slightest glance at Pritchart's beautiful, coldly composed features.