The Oncoming Storm (3 page)

“We’re just friends,” she said tartly. She shouldn’t be surprised her father knew. She and Davidson had been lovers, once upon a time, but the call of duty had separated them, and so they’d parted platonically. “Why?”

“I’m having him assigned to your ship too,” her father said. “If you need support, it will be good to have a marine you can trust behind you.”

“Thank you,” Kat said, icily. “And are you going to be making any other decisions for me today?”

“No,” her father said.

He looked up, meeting her eyes. “I’d like to believe I’m wrong,” he admitted. “Wars are chancy things—you would know better than I. But I don’t think I’m wrong. And if the Theocracy does come over the border . . . you might have a chance to prove you belong in a command chair sooner than you might think.”

Kat shivered.

“She’s a child,” Commander William McElney muttered.

Manfully, he resisted the temptation to throw the datapad across the compartment and into the bulkhead. It was a military-grade machine, capable of surviving an astonishing amount of abuse, but it still would have felt very satisfactory to try and smash it. Angrily, he pushed the impulse aside and reread the official notification for the second time. HMS Lightning had finally been assigned a commanding officer. And it wasn’t him.

William clenched his teeth and then forced himself to relax. He’d hoped that he’d be appointed commander of Lightning, but he’d known it wasn’t likely to happen. He hadn’t been born on Tyre, after all, nor had he been born after Hebrides—his homeworld—had entered the Commonwealth. Someone like him would always lose out to a citizen of Tyre, even though the Navy’s rapid expansion was opening up all kinds of possibilities for those born away from the capital and founder world. But discovering that his prospective CO was nothing more than a child . . .

He glowered down at the terminal and then keyed his access code into the device, accessing the naval datanet. Officially, he only had access to the bare bones of his new commander’s file, but he’d been in the Navy long enough to learn a few tricks. Accessing the complete file—the one that would have been available to a captain or commodore—was relatively simple; indeed, he’d never understood why the Admiralty set out to classify such data in the first place. But it wasn’t reassuring.

There was no aristocracy on Hebrides—or, at least, there hadn’t been one until the Commonwealth had arrived. The planet had simply been too poor to support a ruling class, no matter the pretensions of some of the elected leaders. But he was familiar with the concept—he had thirty years in the Navy—and now, looking down at the file, he understood how his new commander had received her position. She was the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the Commonwealth, a man so staggeringly wealthy that he could buy an entire superdreadnought squadron out of pocket change. The nasty part of his mind wondered just how many superdreadnoughts the old man had bought just to ensure his daughter got a chance to sit in a command chair.

William skimmed through the rest of the file rapidly, noting—to his alarm—that it was surprisingly thin. Either she hadn’t done anything worth mentioning or nothing had been written down—or, if it had, it had been classified well above top secret. He supposed that made a certain kind of sense. The aristocracy wouldn’t be interested in having their dirty laundry aired for all to see, but they would need to know who was letting the side down or simply couldn’t be trusted with any kind of real power. Kat Falcone, it seemed, wasn’t considered a potential risk to the aristocracy’s reputation.

Captain Kat Falcone, he reminded himself sternly. Resentment or no resentment, he was still a professional and he was damn well going to act professionally.

Shaking his head, he switched to the planetary datanet and ran a search. Hundreds of results popped up—it sometimes seemed the media had little better to do but report on the activities of young aristocrats—but Kat Falcone didn’t seem to court scandal. Instead, the reports merely mentioned that she’d gone to Piker’s Peak and then helped save a starship during a border tussle. That, at least, matched with the Navy file, although neither was very informative, suggesting that some of the details had been classified. It left an odd taste in his mouth.

A wider search revealed more about the Falcone family and corporation than he’d ever wanted to know. It was one of the original founding corporations that had moved operations to Tyre; it accounted for the planet’s considerable economic growth before the Breakaway Wars had smashed humanity’s fragile unity and created dozens of independent star systems, some on the brink of total collapse. The family had remained powerful through the economic crash, and then played a key role in organizing the Commonwealth and building up the Royal Tyre Navy. As aristocracies went, he had to admit, they were definitely enlightened.

So why, he asked himself, had the Duke ensured that his daughter received one of the most coveted command chairs in the Navy?

William knew she wasn’t qualified. He’d looked it up. The youngest person to be appointed to command a heavy cruiser had been thirty-seven—eight years older than Captain Falcone. A handful of younger officers had taken command briefly, when their commanders were disabled, but only one of them had been allowed to keep the ship. That particular officer had been in line for a command of his own, according to the files, and the Admiralty had merely decided to leave him on the ship rather than transfer him elsewhere. And he’d been thirty-six.

William’s wristcom bleeped. “Yes?”

“This is Ross,” Lieutenant Linda Ross said. Her voice was, as always, calm and professional. “We have received a signal from groundside. Captain Falcone is on her way.”

William gritted his teeth, unsurprised. It spoke well of her that she wanted to see her new command as soon as possible, he supposed, but Lightning was nowhere near ready to receive her. Half of the ship’s personnel were assigned to urgent duties, while the remainder were scattered all over the ship. The Admiralty had been dragging its feet on assigning additional crewmen to Lightning, something that irked him more than he cared to admit. But a superdreadnought had required urgent crew replenishments in a hurry and Lightning wasn’t scheduled to leave for another two weeks.

“Understood,” he said.

“She specifically requests no greeting party,” Lieutenant Ross added. “And she also wants readiness files transmitted to her at once.”

William lifted an eyebrow. He’d served under five captains since joining the Navy and some of them had been egotistical enough to demand that their senior officers stop work and greet them whenever they returned to the ship. A greeting party was traditional, at least when the captain boarded for the first time, but it would be a headache at such short notice. The captain’s appointment had only been confirmed nine hours ago, for crying out loud. But it spoke well of her too, that she didn’t want a greeting party.

“Transmit the files,” he ordered. Technically, they shouldn’t be sent until after the captain had formally assumed command, but there was no point in withholding them. It would be petty, pointless spite. “Do we have an ETA?”

“Thirty minutes,” Linda said, after a moment. “She’s coming directly from the planet.”

“I’ll meet her at the shuttlebay,” William said. He glanced down at the terminal once again, then returned it to his belt. “Pass the word to the other senior officers, Linda. The captain is about to come aboard.”

He closed the channel and then looked around the Ready Room. It had been intended for the starship’s commander, but he’d found himself using it during the desperate struggle to get Lightning worked up and ready for deployment. As always, the yard dogs had missed things that only experienced crewmembers would have noticed, while other items or problems simply didn’t show themselves until the starship was run at full power for the first time. He looked at the pile of paperwork on his desk—the captain’s desk—and sighed to himself. The room would have to be cleaned before the captain laid eyes on it . . .

No, he told himself. There isn’t anyone who can be spared from more important work.

Leaving the office behind, he walked through Officer Country and into his own cabin. It was smaller than the captain’s chambers, but it suited him, even though the bulkheads were still bare and utterly untouched by any paintings or moving images. A handful of old-fashioned paper books sat on a bookshelf, each one very well thumbed. They’d cost him a month’s salary apiece, but they’d been worth it. There was something about a paper book that was never quite matched by anything on the datanet.

He stripped down rapidly, then pulled his white dress uniform over his underclothes and glanced at the mirror. His homeworld hadn’t possessed any form of rejuvenation technology until after they had made contact with the Commonwealth and it showed. Naval personnel were offered rejuvenation treatments as a matter of course, but his hair was already starting to turn gray, even though he was only sixty. He had a good seventy years of life left in him, he knew, assuming he wasn’t killed in the line of duty, yet he looked old. And he wasn’t vain enough to use cosmetic surgery to make himself look young.

Besides, he thought, looking old makes it easier to get younger crewmen to pay attention.

He keyed his wristcom. “Inform me when the captain is five minutes from arrival,” he ordered. “And then hold any calls for me unless they’re priority one.”

The thought made him smile. Everything was priority one right now, with yard dogs crawling over the cruiser’s hull and countless problems popping up every day that only the CO could solve. Captain Falcone was going to jump right into the deep end, as soon as she assumed command. But, as a good XO, he would take as much of the weight from her shoulders as he could.

“Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Ross said.

Kat felt, at times, as though she belonged in space far more than anywhere else. Space was simple, governed by a set of cold equations that even the most advanced technology in existence couldn’t thrust aside completely. If one made a mistake, one died; it was far simpler than political or social struggles on the planet below. She pressed her face against the porthole as the shuttle rose out of the atmosphere, feeling nothing but relief as the planet fell away behind them. In space, she was free . . .

Or as free as I will ever be, she thought, sourly. Her father’s influence followed her everywhere, ensuring that no one would ever think she’d earned something on her own merits. They might even be right. Her father didn’t have to pull strings overtly to ensure that some toadying admiral would try to flatter or promote his daughter, all in hopes of pleasing Duke Falcone.

Maybe I should just run.

It was rare, she knew, for a member of the aristocracy to simply abandon her title and walk away, but it did happen. There were even legends of one particular aristocrat who had cashed in his trust fund, bought a handful of starships, and set out to build a trading empire of his own on the other side of the Dead Zone surrounding Earth. Others, more practically, found places to live on the other worlds and allowed the universe to pass them by. But Kat knew she was too ambitious to ever abandon her dreams and just walk away. Besides, she knew she’d done well at Piker’s Peak. She was damned if she was throwing her achievement away because of a fit of pique.

“We’re passing the StarCom now,” the pilot called back. “Any last messages?”

Kat snorted, then turned to stare at the giant construction as it floated in high orbit around the planet. It looked crude, like a brick orbiting the planet, but she knew it was a technological marvel, allowing humanity to pulse messages through hyperspace without an open vortex. And yet she also knew that it was incredibly vulnerable. Dozens of automated Orbital Weapons Platforms surrounded the StarCom, while other orbital fortifications and gunboats were nearby, ready to protect it if necessary. Tyre was the only Commonwealth world that had more than one StarCom, but losing this one would be disastrous. They’d wind up dependent on starships to carry messages from star to star, crippling the speed of information as it flowed around the Commonwealth.

She shook her head and then allowed her gaze to drift towards lights orbiting the planet. It was hard to see much at this distance, at least with the naked eye, but she knew what they were: giant orbital industrial nodes, space habitats, and shipyards, some of them owned by her family. Few human minds could truly comprehend the sheer scale of industry surrounding the planet—and yet it was smaller than Earth’s legendary asteroid belt. But Earth was gone now, the Sol System devastated by the Breakaway Wars. Tyre might be the single greatest industrial node remaining in human space.

Unless the Theocracy has a larger industrial base of its own, she thought, morbidly. No one knew anything about the internal layout of Theocratic space, at least nothing more detailed than they had known prior to the Breakaway Wars. Most of the worlds within their sphere had been stage-one colonies, barely capable of supporting themselves, but a handful had funded their own settlement and produced small industrial bases of their own. How far had they progressed, she asked herself, under Theocratic rule? There was no way to know.