Rich Man's War (40 page)

“Well, like I told Sanjay, I didn’t know I was going until the last minute, and then I couldn’t find anyone special to go with.” Tanner shrugged. “Most of my first ideas were either impractical or inappropriate.”

The amused glint in her eye remained. “Like this whole conversation.”

“I’ve missed you, ma’am,” he said, nodding as if to concede the point. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

“You could stay in touch. Maybe write once in a while.”

The suggestion caught him off-guard. He heard no flirtation in her voice. Nothing that anyone could construe as out of line. Perfectly professional. “That’s not inappropriate, too?”

“Maybe, but as long as the letters themselves aren’t inappropriate, I’ll bet the captain of my ship won’t give a damn. She’ll only be in the service for a few more years, anyway.” She paused again, looking at him thoughtfully. “People come and go from your life all the time in this line of work… shame to let rank dictate who you can be friends with once you get out, you know?”

Tanner nodded slowly. “I might have to try that when
Los Angeles
comes off of ‘quiet mode,’ then.”

“About that—any chance you know what this briefing
is about?” she asked, her mind coming back to the business at hand.

“I honestly don’t. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the lady running it is the same lady who put me on your ship.”

“Ah,” Kelly understood. “Then I won’t be surprised, either. Thank you for that. I should probably get to it. Good to see you, Tanner.”

“Good to see you, too. Captain.”

She pursed her lips. “That might be a little more appropriate.”

“Might. I dunno. ‘Ma’am’ does make you sound old.”

Kelly bit back her laughter before it escaped. She shook her head, turned and continued on her way, but Tanner caught a glimpse of her face as she disappeared into the wardroom.

She was still smiling.

* * *

“I’m just saying, you made this whole big deal about looking for a date. I was right here the whole time,” Baldwin explained. Neither she nor Tanner could help but notice the increasing number of navy
crewmen and marines heading in the same direction as they walked through the corridor. “I’m not trying to give you the wrong idea, but you didn’t want to go alone, and who wouldn’t want to get off this boat for a couple days?”

“Okay, but I hadn’t met you yet. You were on opposite shifts from me the entire time.”

“Weren’t you asking people you’d only just met? You didn’t think to say, ‘Hey, guys, isn’t there anyone in the department I could ask?’ Nobody said anything?”

“Well, not really, no,” Tanner
answered, doing his best to keep up as Baldwin weaved between slower walkers. “To be honest, I think people liked seeing me twist in the wind.”

Baldwin looked over
her shoulder skeptically, yet managed to maintain her pace without bumping into anyone. “You’re serious?”

“New guy steps on board and immediately gets sent on shore leave for a ball full of celebrities? You don’t think anyone would want to fuck with me for that? I’m lucky they didn’t set me up with someone’s grandmother or a goat or something.” He paused and added, “Although plenty of people knew I was looking for someone to go with
. Nobody mentioned you.”

He noted the look of displeasure on her face before she turned her attention forward again. “I hate everyone,”
she fumed. “Still. You didn’t maybe look at a roster?”

“I did!”

“And?”

“And the roster says your name is Jesse. That could go either way.”

“It’s short for Jessica! I’m a girl!”

“I noticed!”

“I could’ve worn a dress for once instead of a stupid uniform! My family’s on Raphael. I probably still fit in the dress I wore to prom and it’s still in my closet back home. That would’ve been fine. Jesus, a girl signs up for the Navy, you think she doesn’t want to get dressed up once in a while?”

“You own dresses?” asked a random machinist’s mate as they passed by.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she replied sourly, “who asked you?”

“Well, to be fair,” Tanner ventured, “that kind of swearing wouldn’t go over
well at Ascension Hall.”

“I know when to talk and when to shut up,” she
grumbled, and then glanced around at the growing flood of bodies. “Seriously, is
everyone
going to this? Who’s still on watch?”

“Well, we are kind of overstaffed at the moment
.”

“Gangway!” Baldwin called out, impressing Tanner with the volume of her voice. “Masters at Arms coming through! Gangway!”

To Tanner’s surprise, her tactic worked. Most of the crowd ahead shuffled and squeezed to the right to let them pass on the left. Baldwin broke into a jog, which Tanner followed mostly to back her play. In truth, while they were theoretically on patrol, neither of them had been called to Hangar One because they were needed for crowd control or some other rating-related duty. They’d simply been directed there, like the masses of shipmates, by a message over their holocoms and simultaneous instructions from the duty dispatcher.

Thanks to Baldwin’s shouting, they managed to arrive roughly halfway through the assembly period. Numerous members of the deck department
handled issues of crowd control. Baldwin tugged Tanner over to one side and away from the crowd as soon as they were in the hangar bay. The pair remained on the outskirts, doing a decent job of looking semi-official while really just being two more faces in the crowd.

“They’re all
Los Angeles
crew,” Tanner noted as they got a better look. “Everyone’s wearing the ship patch on their shoulders. Marines, too.”

“Yeah, I caught that,” Baldwin murmured. She glanced around. “Notice the shuttles are all out to make room? There have to be at least a thousand people in here.”

“Going on two thousand,” said a bo’sun from behind them. “Standing room only, going to get a bit tight in here.”

“Jesus,” breathed Tanner, “why didn’t they send out an all-call? This isn’t on the
Plan of the Day or on any schedule I saw.”

“Hey, they don’t tell me, so I couldn’t tell you,” shrugged the bo’sun.

“They woke people up for this,” Baldwin observed. “I know some of these people. They should be asleep right now. What is going on?”

Tanner looked around for some better vantage point and found
two low storage containers. He climbed up onto one of them and swept the hangar bay with his gaze. “I think we’re about to find out,” he said as he helped Baldwin up. Seconds later, they could see the XO of the ship along with several other officers near a mobile loading platform.

“I don’t recognize all of those people,”
Baldwin frowned. “And I should.”

Soon, the flow of bodies into the hangar bay slowed to a trickle, and then seemed more or less over. As the bo’sun had warned,
space amounted to standing room only. The deck crewmen and several hangar bay engineers maintained a perimeter of sorts to keep people from leaning or sitting on mobile equipment and machinery lining the bulkheads. The loading platform up toward the center of the bay rose, with a couple of officers riding it as if to give everyone someone to look at. Then one of them called out the order, enhanced by the hangar bay’s public address system: “Attention on deck!”

Everyone stood rigid. The bay went silent. Soon, they all saw one more officer, wearing her vac suit like the rest of them, ascend the loading platform.

“Thank you for your rapid assembly,” said Admiral Yeoh. “I have a few things to explain, and I wanted to do it personally. Stand at ease.” She paused for a breath, long enough to make sure everyone’s attention remained focused, and then began speaking.

“I want to thank you all for putting up with all of the stress and inconvenience of the last few days. I must ask much more of you in the near future. Yet I know you will live up to every challenge, as you lived up to this one and all the challenges before it.

“Most of you here are ‘new guard.’ You’ve risen to an enhanced level of training and readiness. You either passed through our new basic training regimen and then came into the fleet, or you met new rigorous standards and fulfilled numerous qualifications suited to the Archangel Navy’s new philosophy. You marines are trained and capable of filling out any number of navy crew billets if the situation demands it. You navy crewmen stand ready to shoulder a weapon and go into combat with your marine comrades. The new guard of the Archangel Navy is the best-trained and best-prepared militia force in the Union. I don’t tell you this to make you feel proud of yourselves or justify all these new standards,” she said, gazing levelly at the hundreds of young men and women before her. “I made sure you would be the best in the Union because Archangel
needs
you to be the best.

“By now, you’re all aware of the news from the president’s Annual Address. You know we have severed our ties with NorthStar, Lai
Wa and CDC. You know the legislature is united in this decision, and you know why. You know what those companies have done to you, to your family and your friends. And as you can imagine, the Big Three are
not happy
about that revelation.”

A few people in the audience chuckled. The admiral did not.

“Ladies and gentlemen, those corporations may not let us go. They may well come after us. They may feel their survival is at stake, and they may feel the need to make an example of us. If that happens, and I believe it will,” she noted, “they will not come to make a token show of force. They will come with a navy greater than any in human space save for the Union Fleet. They will bring battleships and cruisers and assault carriers with the intent of occupying our homes. They will have considerably greater numbers and greater firepower. And still, it will fall to us—to you and I and the rest of the Archangel Navy—to throw them back out on their asses.”

Her calm, firm demeanor did not invite cheers. Indeed, Tanner looked around and saw more than a few worried faces in the crowd. Admiral Yeoh, as always, looked serene and sure.

“If they come, it will likely happen soon. Weeks, but probably not months. We have time to prepare. That’s why you’re all here now, packed in on
Los Angeles
like a good many of your comrades are packed on board the frigates and destroyers nearby. I’ve spoken with their captains. They know their roles. It’s time you knew yours.”

Yeoh touched a button on the holocom attached to her wrist. Large screens, likely routed through powerful holo projectors mounted in the shuttle bay’s bulkheads, lit up to either side of her. The screens showed a tactical layout of the fleet of ships around
Los Angeles
—most of the destroyers the Navy had, along with all of its frigates and more than half of the corvettes. The other showed a projection of the star system, noting key military points from Michael to Augustine.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Operation Beowulf.”

From his spot on top of the crates with Baldwin at his side, Tanner watched Yeoh bring up more projections. His mouth slowly fell open. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

* * *

“It’s a
job
. You ain’t here defending your homes, and this whole fiasco isn’t some mission to save the Union.” Harris’s glare moved from one member of the ten-man assault team to next. Street lighting and the illumination from various electronics gave him a look at their young, tense faces. The rest of their bodies were covered by black recon armor. Though they ranged anywhere from raw recruits to five years in service, almost all of them were on their first combat tour.

Each member of the team underwent a tough training regimen to get to this point, but the selection process wasn’t finished until they’d completed a combat tour under the guidance of fully-qualified NorthStar Rangers. To Harris’s thinking, that was about the most useful thing he or anyone else in the NorthStar fleet would get out of
Scheherazade. Peacekeeping ops made for decent live-fire on-the-job training and not much else.

“These fuckers killed Cunningham,” grumbled one of the riflemen. Finch was a big guy, which had its advantages. The recon armor didn’t offer the level of powered assistance found in other models, but it still gave
the wearer’s strength a significant boost. That on top of Finch’s native strength made him a natural choice for door-kicker if the job called for it. “You saying they aren’t up for some payback?”

“I’m saying that payback will come one way or the other. Don’t get
yourself
killed making it happen,” Harris replied. His tone made plain his lack of patience for any further argument. “Cunningham went out like a soldier. He called out that ambush to keep the rest of you alive. That was the right thing to do. But he chose to be out here, just like you. He thought combat would be a thrill, and he wasn’t wrong. He wanted the right to say he was one of the best and he wanted the paycheck to go with it. You all feel the same way, or you wouldn’t be here.

“But people die in combat, on both sides. Don’t get bent out of shape when someone else who feels the same damn way you do buys the farm. Not if you want to do this for a living. He wasn’t a victim, he was a volunteer. This war ain’t a cause for you. It’s a job.”