Alarm of War, Book II: The Other Side of Fear (2 page)

"And Sir Henry doesn't know," Hiram said.  A statement, not a question.

Anne shook her head.  "No, and you shall not tell him, either.  Sir Henry does not understand The Light, nor trust them."  Hiram looked at her evenly.  She felt a little flash of guilt, but suppressed it.  "Commander, my mother taught me two very basic survival skills:  that a queen needs as many sources of information as she can get,
and
that no one should know everything she is up to.   I don't apologize for that; it is simply how a ruler must live."

Hiram nodded slowly.  "Majesty, you know you have my loyalty.  You saved me from being tossed out an airlock.  But I can't help you if I don't have all the information at your disposal.  My value to you is in my 'moments of great clarity.'  That only works if I have information to work with."   He studied her for a moment.  “If I had to guess, I would say that The Light has spies in the Dominion sector, and that over the years Jong has been keeping Queen Beatrice - and now you - informed about them."

Queen Anne snorted.  "Not just Dominion, Mr. Brill, but all of the other sectors as well, even Tilleke.  Jong's spy network is astonishing."

Hiram raised an eyebrow at this.  Victoria had spies in many of the sectors, including the Dominion, but they had never successfully penetrated the Tilleke Empire.  If The Light had gotten into Tilleke, their network
was
astonishing.  "Okay, but why share their information with Victoria?  Victoria is no great friend of The Light."  Hiram asked.

“Because The Light understood – long before we did – that the Dominion and Tilleke are expansionist.”  She paused, rolling the word on her tongue.  “Such a sterile word, ‘expansionist.’  No, the Tilleke and Dominion are intent on
conquering.
  They both wanted something and they intended to take it by force. The Light was hedging its bets, trying to keep one strong ally in its pocket in case it ever needed it.”

Hiram tried to digest this.  “Why didn’t they come to us sooner with their warning about the Dominion?”

The Queen shrugged.  “They didn’t know for sure?  Or they have their own internal politics?  It doesn’t matter, as long as we can get them to solidly commit to us now.”  “She smiled.  “That will be my job, Mr. Brill, not yours.  You have enough on your plate.”

“Majesty, it is really important for us to find that Dominion shipyard.  We need to find out if The Light knows where it is.  If they don’t, we are going to have to sneak scout ships into the Dominion sector and start searching.  It will take a long time to find it.”

“Tomorrow night at eight o’clock I have another meeting with Admiral Douthat and the members of the Senior Staff.  Plan on attending, Mr. Brill,” she said.  She smiled her predatory smile.  “I don’t want to be bottled up here for a day longer than necessary.  The sooner the Dominion is reacting to what we do, the better.”

As he left the Queen’s quarters, the two armsmen exchanged a glance, and then John said, “Mr. Brill, the Queen listens to you.  Anything you can do to persuade her to go back to Atlas would be appreciated.”

Hiram blinked in surprise.  This is was the first time any of the Queen’s armsmen had spoken to him, at least without a gun against his head.  “What’s the matter, John?”

John frowned.  “This is a
resort,
not a military base.  It’s wide open.  There is no safe room, no protected escape routes, no way to properly seal off this wing.  We’ve got only ten bodyguards plus a bunch of Marines.  If someone attacked us here with any force, well,” he shrugged.  “She’d be a lot safer on Atlas, with the
Lionheart
close by, and I’d sleep a lot better.”

“Did you talk to Sir Henry?” Hiram asked.

John nodded.  “Sure.  He said he would talk to her, but that she did not want to insult Refuge after they’d gone out of their way to welcome her.”

“You may have noticed that our queen is a little stubborn,” Hiram said dryly.  “But I’ll try.”

* * * *

Martha Wilkinson thumbed the call button.  “Come!” a voice called and she entered the room.

Admiral Douthat looked up in annoyance.  There were dark circles under her eyes and she looked like death warmed over.  “I’m trying to get some sleep here, dammit!” she said peevishly.   “I am under orders from the Queen herself to get some sleep!  Why won’t people leave me alone?”

“Oh, stop being such a cry baby,” Wilkinson said, sitting down uninvited.  “Gods of Our Mothers, you’re worse now than when we were at the Academy, and you were bloody insufferable then.”

Douthat glared at her.  Full admirals had wilted under that glare.

“And don’t give that
look
, Alyce.  You should know by now that it won’t work on me,” Wilkinson chided her.  “Besides, it gives you wrinkles and God knows the two of us have more than enough already.”  She looked around the cabin.  “Isn’t there anything to drink?  It has been a bloody long day and I need a gin.”

“I really do need to get some sleep,” Douthat told her with exasperation.

Wilkinson patted her hand.  “I know you do.  It was me who suggested to the Queen that all of her senior staff are bloody knackered.  But before you go into your meeting tomorrow, you need to have my report on your ship captains.  Won’t take but a minute.”   She smiled warmly, her rounded cheeks giving her a grandmotherly appearance, although Douthat knew damn well that Martha Wilkinson was neither a grandmother nor grandmotherly.

Douthat suppressed a sigh.  Martha Wilkinson was her oldest friend and the senior physician in the Fleet, or what was left of it.  She had been on Atlas when the Dominion attack came, and so had joined in their escape to Refuge.  Martha had warned her that the Fleet would suffer from a high number of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder – old fashioned combat fatigue – and that no one, regardless of rank, was immune.  “Like it or not, this has been a peace time navy,” she’d told Douthat, “with virtually no experience in the stresses of combat.  Suddenly, within the space of a few hours, every member of the Home Fleet went from peace and safety to being invaded by an enemy that’s bigger and stronger than we are.  The fighting has been fierce and we escaped by the skin of our teeth. And we left
everything
behind.  Our world, our homes, our families, our Queen and, last but not least, our sense of Victorian invincibility.  What you need to understand, Alyce, as Admiral and First Sea Lord, is that the psychological trauma has been huge.  It’s shattering.  Some of your people simply won’t cope, and you’ll see the fallout at all levels of rank, from the newest recruit to some of your oldest captains.”

So, Douthat had asked her to run diagnostic neuro scans on her thirty-four ship captains.  She needed to know how many of them were coping with the strain, and how many were not.

“Give me the short version, Marti.  I’m too tired to wade through your report right now.”

Wilkinson opened a file on her tablet.  “Of your thirty-four current ship captains, you need to urgently replace five and keep a really close eye on three others.” 

Douthat could not hide her shock.  “Eight of them!  Gods of Our Mothers,
eight?”
  Douthat closed her eyes.  Where would she find eight replacements?  She shook her head in despair.  Without enough captains-

“Alyce, stop that!” Wilkinson scolded.  “I can see what’s going on in that doom-and-gloom mind of yours.  You always jump to the worst conclusions.  Haven’t you learned anything since second year physics at the Academy?” 

When they were roommates together at the Academy, Douthat had been in a panic that she’d flunked the physics final.  Physics was a required course in the Engineering track and flunking it would result in dismissal.  She’d wept and ranted over how stupid she was and how her life was ruined, and had even packed her bags to leave then and there rather than face the humiliation when the grades were posted.  Martha Wilkinson had reasoned with her and comforted her and, when all else failed, spiked her drink with a strong sedative that put her to sleep.  When Douthat woke up ten hours later, the grades had been posted.

She got a “C+.”   She’d glared at Wilkinson, unpacked her bags and schooled herself, with intermittent success, not to let her fears get the best of her in the future.

“I told you
five
needed to be replaced, not all eight,” Wilkinson reminded her tartly.  “I’ve already initiated a search through the Home Fleet’s service records.  There are plenty of good people to choose from.”

Douthat let out a deep breath.   “Okay, but we’re hanging by a thread here.  We can build more ships, but until we can take back Cornwall and Christchurch, we’ll be short on crews to man them.  And that particularly goes for officers.”

Wilkinson nodded.  “There is one other person you need to tend to.  She isn’t suffering from PTSD, though for the life of me I don’t understand why, but she is deeply bothered by something that happened.”

“Emily Tuttle?” Douthat asked.

Wilkinson eyed her sharply, then nodded.  “The neuro scan suggests she is on the edge of a serious depression.  I looked up her record and even talked to her XO – who, by the way, is senior in rank to her and should have been the captain.  The XO, Rudd, sings her praises and says she’s brilliant.  That got me more interested, so I had Gandalf assemble a report on Tuttle’s actions and engagements during the battle. 

“Alyce, whoever this girl is, she’s seen more intense action than any two of your other captains combined.  She was with Captain Grey’s task force that almost got wiped out cutting off the Dominion’s supply train, and she was with Captain Rowe’s Coldstream Guards when they
did
get wiped out holding off the Dominion attack to our rear.” 

Wilkinson shook her head.  “According to the reports, she was down to three heavily damaged ships, trying to hold off an oversized Duck battleship with an escort of five cruisers.  If I am to believe the ship’s log, she was just about ready to
ram
the damn thing in order to stop it.”

“She survived,” Douthat said.  “A lot of others didn’t.”

“Oh, don’t be obtuse, Alyce, you’re too intelligent,” Wilkinson said irritably.  “And for pity’s sake don’t retreat into macho posturing.  How many times do I have to tell you that macho posturing is a poor substitute for thinking?  You’re a woman and you should know better.  Of course Tuttle
survived
, but she survived after she sent her best friend – some Fleet Marine ground pounder – on a suicide mission to disable the oversized Dominion battleship.   Or to put it more bluntly, Tuttle survived, we
all
survived, because Tuttle sacrificed a personal friend.  And now it’s eating her alive.”

“Are you telling me to relieve her?” Douthat asked.

Wilkinson shook her head.  “Absolutely not.  Unless I miss my guess, she’ll be one of your best captains.  There’s no need to relieve her, but if you don’t give her a little time to heal, she could break.  If that happens, you’ll be out a perfectly good captain.  You need to give her some leave and send her off somewhere for a few days.  Not on the space station, somewhere here on Haifa where she’s not reminded every day of the war.  Send her to the beach or to the mountains, somewhere she can get her head clear.   Let her have some fun, be silly, get drunk.  No responsibilities for ten days.  And if she’s got a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, send them along, too.  Never underestimate the restorative powers of good vacation sex.”

Douthat nodded, but she had her own ideas about what type of vacation might be good for Emily Tuttle.

The steward came then, carrying a bottle of cold white wine for Admiral Douthat and bottles of chilled gin and tonic for Admiral Wilkinson.  Wilkinson looked askance at the tonic.  “Are you trying to ruin good gin?” she demanded.  The steward muttered apologies, collected the tonic and bowed out of the door.  The two women spent a moment pouring their drinks, and taking their first sips.

“Gods of Our Mothers,” Wilkinson sighed in pleasure, “I’ve waited all day for this.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet, Marti,” Douthat said softly.  “They’ve got us cornered and bottled up.  Their navy is bigger than ours and they hold our home world hostage.  Even if we win this, it’s going to be bloody awful.”

Wilkinson shook her head.   “More fools them.  They think they’ll win because they’ve got numerical supremacy, but they didn’t do their homework on you before they started this stupid war.  If they had, they would have learned that in addition to being a worry wart, you have another trait: Once you are in a fight, Alyce Douthat, you never, ever give up.”

Wilkinson clicked her glass to Douthat’s.  “To Billy MacLeod,” she said solemnly, “may he rot in hell, and to the Law of Unintended Consequences.”

Douthat snorted wryly and drank her wine.  Billy MacLeod had been an Academy senior when Alyce and Martha were both in their second year.  MacLeod had ignored the short, chubby Douthat, but had been instantly attracted to the lithesome, red-headed Wilkinson.  The feeling was not reciprocated, but Martha’s coolness only made MacLeod more aggressive.  In another man it might have been charming, but MacLeod was a bully at heart and charming wasn’t his strong suit.  First he pursued her, then he badgered her and, finally, he stalked her.  It came to a head the weekend before MacLeod was to graduate.  Martha and Alyce had gone bar hopping.  In one of the bars they had gotten separated in the crowd.  At first Douthat wasn’t worried, but after a few minutes she began to look for Wilkinson in earnest.