Manticore Ascendant 1: A Call to Duty (eARC) Page 10

  * * *

  It was raining when Travis left the classroom building, his head spinning with the latest cubic meter’s worth of information that had been poured into his skull. Worse, there was going to be a test on that very material right after dinner.

  Still, it could be worse. If he only took a half portion and wolfed it down, then used the rest of the time to study—

  His train of thought came to an abrupt halt. Standing five meters directly in front of him was Gunner’s Mate Funk. The petty officer was staring woodenly at Travis, apparently oblivious to the rain water pouring off his hat.

  “Gunner’s Mate,” Travis said, stopping as quickly as he safely could on the wet pavement.

  “Come with me,” Funk said. Turning, he strode away.

  Travis’s first, hopeful thought was that they were headed for the mess hall. They passed it by without slowing. His second was that they were going to the Base Exchange. It, too, was soon behind them. Travis kept walking, his eyes on the back of Funk’s neck, the hairs on the back of his own neck starting to tingle unpleasantly. The only structure in this direction was the picnic shelter overlooking the base’s game yard. A yard that was, not surprisingly given the downpour, currently deserted.

  But the shelter wasn’t. As Funk led the way toward it, Travis could see a shadowy figure standing rigidly in the center of the shelter with his back toward them.

  I’m going to die. I’m going to die, and then they’re going to bury me in the sand in the high-jump pit. Quickly, guiltily, Travis chased the ridiculous thought from his mind.

  But if he wasn’t here to be quietly murdered, what was he here for?

  Funk led the way up the shelter’s pair of short steps, and as Travis came up the steps behind him the third man finally turned to face them. He was middle aged, his hair a short-cropped graying blond, his forehead and cheeks lined, his expression neutral. Now, close up, Travis could also see that he was wearing the insignia of a senior chief petty officer.

  “Senior Chief,” Funk greeted the man, his tone formal. “Spacer Third Travis Long, as requested.”

  “Spacer Long,” the man said, just as formally. “I’m Senior Chief Dierken. You’re in a purple-gilled mess of trouble, Spacer.”

  Travis felt his heart seize up. He flicked a glance at Funk, but the other was watching him with the same hard expression that Dierken was.

  “You were told to stay clear of Lieutenant Cyrus,” Dierken continued. “Why the hell didn’t you listen?”

  “Uh…” Travis’s brain seemed to shrivel under Dierken’s glare. “I didn’t—”

  “No one ever does,” the Senior Chief cut him off brusquely. “No matter. Too late now, anyway. You’ve rattled the wrong cage, Long, and your life’s about to change. Drastically.

  “Sit down, shut up, and listen.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In some ways, Commodore Kiselev mused, his return to academia felt like coming home.

  In other ways, it felt like exile.

  He scowled out the window of his new office in the Casey-Rosewood HQ building. A real window, not a viewscreen, with grass and trees and blue sky on the other side. His office didn’t face any of the main pedestrian routes, but there was a lesser-used walkway in sight and every minute or two someone went striding briskly past. Occasionally, an air car cut across the corner of his view, heading over the top of the building on its way to the landing area or rising over the roof as it headed out again. It was certainly tolerable, even reasonably pleasant.

  But it wasn’t like being aboard a ship. It didn’t even feel, really, like being a proper Naval officer.

  It felt like being a civilian.

  He sighed, a long, frustrated sound that he would never have given vent to in front of anyone else. He still missed Mars, and he was still angry at what was being done to her.

  But the past few weeks had turned the red-hot fury in his heart into a cooler ache in the pit of his stomach. He’d done everything he could to save his ship, and his efforts had failed. Time to let her go. His job now was to usher new spacers through this second stage of their training and prepare them for life in the Royal Manticoran Navy.

  Assuming that the Navy still existed by the time they were ready for their assignments.

  He gave the view one last look, then turned back to his desk and terminal. If the RMN was going to fade away, there was nothing he could do to stop it. But let it never be said that Commodore Horace Kiselev had been part of its demise. He would do his job; and the first part of that job was to familiarize himself with everyone under his command.

  He’d spent the entire day yesterday going through the officer and instructor files. Today, it was time to look at the students themselves.

  Pulling up the first of the files, he began to read.

  It was just before four in the afternoon when he reached the file of Spacer Third Class Travis Uriah Long.

  Up to now Kiselev had been skimming the reports. Not anymore. This one he read carefully, all the way through. Then he reread two other files, read Long’s again, and followed three of the attached links.

  When he had finished, he sent out a summons for Lieutenant William Cyrus to report to his office.

  He was checking a section of the Uniform Code of Conduct when the yeoman ushered Cyrus into the office.

  The other strode to Kiselev’s desk and came to attention.

  “Lieutenant William Cyrus reporting as ordered, Sir,” he announced formally.

  “At ease, Lieutenant,” Kiselev said, studying the other’s face. It seemed open and guileless, the face of a man with no strains on his conscience. “I’ve been reading over the personnel files,” he continued. “I like what I see.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” Cyrus said briskly. “We have a good team here.”

  “So it seems,” Kiselev said. “Tell me about Spacer Third Class Travis Long.”

  Cyrus had his expression under good control, as befitted a man who’d had to deal with all kinds of superiors through the course of his career. But the control wasn’t perfect. “Sir?” he asked, his tone suddenly cautious, his face tightening just enough for Kiselev to see.

  “It says here that Long was caught cheating on a test,” Kiselev said, waving toward the terminal, “and that he was subsequently transferred from your impeller track to the gravitics track. In fact, from the date stamps, it looks like he was immediately transferred to gravitics. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Cyrus said. “As you can see, it was on a quiz—”

  “Cheating is a serious offense, Lieutenant, punishable by summary dishonorable discharge,” Kiselev cut him off. “So why didn’t you go ahead and file formal charges? Why was he simply transferred to a different track?”

  “We, uh, were still trying to ascertain the circumstances when he put in for a transfer to gravitics. It was thought that a fresh start—someone must have thought it would be good for him, because the transfer went through immediately.”

  “And you didn’t challenge it?” Kiselev asked. “You and your witness? I assume you did have a witness to this alleged cheating?”

  Cyrus’s throat worked.

  “Ah…the suspicion was brought to my attention by one of Long’s instructors, Sir.”

  “The suspicion,” Kiselev said. “Not any actual cheating? Just the suspicion of cheating?”

  Cyrus was starting to take on the look of a cornered animal.

  “Someone apparently thought it was advisable to transfer him to a track—”

  “Yes, you already said that,” Kiselev said. “Would you like to know what I think, Lieutenant? I think that Long’s allegations of cheating in the impeller unit threatened your own record, so you trumped up this charge as an excuse to get him out of your hair. And if that got the kid bounced on his butt with a DD in his permanent record to hang over his head for the rest of his life, that was just too damned bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Sir, I—there were no allegations of cheating,” Cyrus protested. �
��I mean, he had suspicions, but never offered any specifics.”

  “Didn’t he?” Kiselev countered. “Or did you simply refuse to listen?”

  “He had no specifics, Sir,” Cyrus insisted.

  “That’s interesting.” Kiselev gestured to the terminal again. “Because he filed quite a number of specifics onto the Provost Marshal’s records folder. Including names, times, and methods.”

  Cyrus’s mouth twitched. Apparently, he hadn’t realized Long had done that.

  “I—Sir, I had no idea—”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Kiselev said. “Because the regs call for all such accusations to be dual-filed that way, except hardly anyone ever does. I gather Long is a strict rule-follower?”

  Cyrus seemed to gather himself. “Sir, none of those accusations are provable,” he said flatly. “And even if they were…Sir, half the damn class is involved. And you know as well as I do that they’ll all need to be retrained anyway once they’re aboard their ships.”

  “That’s your defense, Lieutenant?” Cyrus asked coldly. “That everyone does it, and that it doesn’t matter anyway?”

  Cyrus’s jaw wrinkled with a momentary clenching of his teeth.

  “Sir, Spacer Long is a royal pain in the butt. He’s disruptive, argues every little damn thing, and irritates everyone around him. I just…it seemed better to let the transfer go through without a fuss. Let him irritate someone else for a change.”

  “Someone who wouldn’t put impossible situations into midshipman simulations?” Kiselev suggested. “Oh, yes, that’s in here, too,” he added as Cyrus paled. “So is the link to your many attempts to get BuEng and BuOrd interested in your dual-stage missile idea. Though to be fair, Long didn’t know about those. I dug up that connection myself.”

  “Sir—”

  “Bottom line, Lieutenant Cyrus,” Kiselev said, dropping his voice into the cryogenic temperature range. “Did Spacer Long cheat, or didn’t he?”

  Cyrus’s throat worked again.

  “No, Sir.”

  Kiselev let the words hang in the air for a long moment.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said at last. “We’ll be talking again later. Dismissed.”

  He stared at the closed door for a long time after Cyrus left, simmering with anger and frustration. And wondering what he was going to do about this.

  Because the hell of it was that, on one level, Cyrus was right. The bright-eyed students here would have to be retrained once their theoretical schooling slammed head-on into the real world. The dirty little secret was that the training school’s main purpose was merely to give them the basic background they would need to build on once they reached their ships, along with the intellectual techniques required to assimilate new information. The rest of the bookwork was essentially meaningless, especially here in the RMN’s declining days, when more equipment and techniques were cobbled together than were taken shiny out of the box. Exposing the students’ cheating to the light would merely kick out a bunch of perfectly adequate spacers and open the RMN to a scandal it couldn’t afford.

  Worse yet were the specific students who would be thrown out. The Navy might be in its twilight days, but that hadn’t stopped the rich and powerful from sending their sons and daughters to try to grab some glory and command rank for themselves before the end. The Academy was always the first choice, of course, but when the midshipman slots were filled the next choice was Casey-Rosewood and the hoped-for petty officer track. The names on Long’s list of offenders weren’t the biggest on Manticore, but they were big enough, and their high and noble families would not take kindly to having those names smeared across the center of a scandal.

  And the last thing the Navy needed was more names on its enemies list.

  Which meant that for the good of the Service, Kiselev was going to have to sweep this one under the rug. No punishment for the students, no overt punishment for Cyrus.

  And Spacer Long would be left hanging in the wind.

  Kiselev scowled at his terminal. Maybe, but maybe not. Long had been in the center of his impeller class—a decent enough showing, considering that most of those above him were habitual cheaters, but on paper hardly spectacular. In contrast, in the gravitics track where Cyrus had sent him he was second of eleven students. A much better showing, probably helped along by Lieutenant Krauss’s practice of allowing her students to use notes during tests. Her argument, delineated in full in her file, was that a lot of on-board gravitic work was done via ship’s computer, where relevant formulas were always available, and therefore those formulas didn’t need to be memorized. A reasonable enough teaching philosophy, Kiselev had concluded, which also had the benefit of making most cheating superfluous. Long would rise or fall there on his own, and it looked like he was rising just fine.

  And really, gravitics was as just good a specialty as impellers. All Long had lost in this whole deal had been a little pride and a little face, and most of that had been between him and a handful of others, since Cyrus had needed to keep the details of his plot private.

  Besides, deep down, Kiselev could sympathize with Cyrus’s motivation. Strict rule-followers tended to be staid, petty, and colorless, usually with little humor and no imagination. They were the invisible ones, plugging along at their jobs and keeping things running, but seldom attracting the attention of anyone higher than their division head. They stayed strictly on the lines, never daring anything new or deviating from the precise rule of regulations and orders. Long would do his years in the Navy, collect an unimpressive list of unenthusiastic commendations, and be promoted on schedule until he reached the end of his career. At that point, he would retire to sit in the shade with his grandchildren, as colorless at the end of his life as he’d been at the beginning of it.

  Assuming he ever had grandchildren. That personality type didn’t exactly draw husband-seeking women.

  So Spacer Long was set. Which left just one loose end Kiselev still needed to tie up.

  Senior Chief Dierken responded to the summons faster even than Lieutenant Cyrus had. Almost, Kiselev mused, as if he’d been expecting the call.

  “Good to see you, Senior Chief,” Kiselev said after the official greetings were out of the way. “It’s been awhile.”

  “Three years two months, Sir.” Dierken grinned lopsidedly. “And no, I had to look it up. Congratulations on your promotion, by the way.”

  “Thank you.” Kiselev raised his eyebrows. “Tell me about Spacer Third Class Travis Long.”

  “Off the record, Sir?”

  “Extremely,” Kiselev assured him.

  “Lieutenant Cyrus was planning to kick Long out of the service,” Dierken said. “He trumped up a cheating charge—”

  “I know all that,” Kiselev said. “Skip to the part where your signature’s on Long’s transfer orders.”

  Dierken gave a small shrug.

  “I heard through the grapevine that Long was being set up for a fall. A couple of people I trust said he was good Navy material but hadn’t yet learned how and when to keep his mouth shut.”

  “And so you arranged to get him transferred out of impellers before Cyrus could drop a brick on him?”

  “The Navy takes care of its own, Sir,” Dierken said. “I figured that Cyrus was at least smart enough to recognize a fait accompli and not push his case. Especially since the charges were one hundred percent soap bubble to begin with.”

  Kiselev smiled faintly.

  “Soap bubble?” he chided. “Language, Senior Chief, language.”

  “Yes, Sir, I know,” Dierken said with a wry smile. “Ever since Eleanor started asking our pastor’s wife in for Sunday afternoon tea, I’ve had to work on editing my language.”

  “It’s good practice,” Kiselev said. “So how much of Long’s career have you mapped out?”

  “Me, Sir?” Dierken said with feigned astonishment. “Surely you’re not serious. You know I don’t screw with people’s lives.”

  “Unless they’re part of your
division?”

  “Well, yes,” Dierken conceded. “In that case I screw with them completely. All I know is that it looks like Long is slated to be assigned to Vanguard after graduation.”

  Kiselev smiled humorlessly. Vanguard. Commanded by Captain Robert Davison, one of the most lackluster commanders in the Navy.

  “He and Davison should get along swimmingly,” he murmured.

  “I’m sure he will, Sir,” Dierken agreed dryly. “How he’ll get along with everyone else, of course, is an entirely different question. I’m told Vanguard’s crew can be a troublesome bunch.”

  Kiselev nodded. An environment like that would definitely be a pain in Long’s butt.

  But he’d make it through. Rule-followers were stiff and annoying, but they were usually survivors. If only because they kept things running while everyone else was goofing off.

  “Speaking of troublesome…?” Dierken said.

  “Yes,” Kiselev said. “Unfortunately, there’s really nothing I can do about Lieutenant Cyrus. The spacers Long caught cheating are well-connected, and I can’t stir up anything on Cyrus without dragging Long and everyone else into the stewpot along with him.”

  “That’s kind of what I figured, Sir,” Dierken said. “That’s okay. All I wanted to do here was keep a promising kid in the Navy. Lieutenant Cyrus’s fate is out of my hands. Wouldn’t want it there anyway.”

  “Things tend to balance out,” Kiselev said. “Thank you. You and Eleanor should come by the house sometime, now that I’m permanently back on Manticore.”

  “Thank you, Sir, I’d like that,” Dierken said. “I’ll have her call Juliana and find a time for us to all get together.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Kiselev said. “Dismissed, Senior Chief.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Stiffening to attention, Dierken turned and left the room.

  Kiselev leaned back in his seat, turning to once again stare out his window. So that was that. He would deal with Cyrus by not dealing with him, by letting matters stand as they were. It wasn’t ideal—hell, it was about as far from ideal as it was possible to get.

  But it was the best solution for a difficult situation. What was best for the Navy came before what was best for any individual member of it.