“Yes, sir; thank you.”
The first thing Esmay did after coming back from her interview with the admiral was pull a diagram of the various commands aboard the DSR. She had thought she understood how the chains of command ran, and who reported to whom about what . . . but several things the admiral had said left her confused.
A few hours later, she was only slightly less confused, but considerably entertained. With very few exceptions—and DSRs were the primary exception—Fleet vessels had a simple command structure, with the captain at the top, and authority descending rank by rank through the officers to the enlisted personnel. An admiral aboard a flagship had no direct authority over the ship’s crew: all orders had to flow through the regular captain.
But the size of the newer DSRs had tempted Fleet to treat them as mobile bases. Rather than maintain separate technical schools and laboratory facilities at Sector HQ, staff had decided to put them aboard the Koskiusko, which needed most of the equipment anyway. Thus the Koskiusko had multiple commands, each headed by an admiral, which were expected to use the same facilities—and even the same experts—for different purposes. If Fleet had wanted to create a venue for massive turf battles, it could have invented no better arrangement.
Esmay found the debris of such battles in the files. The Special Materials Fabrication Facility, for instance: it was supposed to serve the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard by making all the materials needed to maintain an inventory of structural members. But it also served the Senior Technical Schools, where students learned to make such materials, and the Special Materials Research Lab, where the most inventive materials scientists struggled to develop new materials with exotic properties.
On the first deployment a massive fight developed between the 14th Heavy Maintenance, which wanted a larger inventory of the crystal-bonded structural members for repair, and the other two commands, which insisted that they needed a guaranteed minimum access to the facility to fulfill their missions.
That argument had risen through the various chains of command until the admirals involved were, as Pitak put it, “locked in a room to fight it out until only one emerged victorious.” The solution—a compromise reached with all admirals still alive and kicking vigorously—satisfied no one, but its inconvenience suggested that complaint would only make things worse.
Even the traditional division between the ship’s crew and its passengers had eroded. Though in theory Captain Hakin had the ultimate authority for the ship’s security and functioning, his crew was outnumbered many times by the personnel of the 14th Heavy Maintenance Yard. When a previous Yard commander wanted to run an “outrigger tube” between T-3 and T-4, between the lateral docking bays, he’d done so. Esmay found the furious correspondence launched by the then captain to the admiral then commanding the 14th Heavy Maintenance, and the directive from Sector HQ that the offending tube would be allowed to remain. The captain had been reassigned.
No wonder the ship’s architecture didn’t match the computer specs, and everyone needed update cubes to keep track of the changes!
Above the ship level, the chain of command looked more like a tree diagram. Captain Hakin’s superior was Admiral Gourache, commander of this wave, whose superior was the Sector 14 commandant, Admiral Foxworth. Admiral Dossignal, however, reported directly to the sector commandant; he was responsible for all maintenance functions in the sector. Admiral Livadhi was Training Command’s representative in this sector, and not under the sector commander at alclass="underline" Fleet Headquarters had taken over all training functions sixty years before. Similarly, the medical command had its own separate chain, this time running back to Admiral Surgeon General Boussy, back at Rockhouse.
Her father would never have put up with this mess. On Altiplano, the military medical service was firmly and formally subordinate to the operational command. Yes, and that’s how he was able to conceal your trauma, her memory prompted. No one was going to argue with the hero of the war . . . .
That wasn’t fair. She wasn’t even sure it had been a military hospital. She wasn’t going to think about it anyway. She put the displays away; she understood the command structure well enough now. She could start preparing for her presentation to the discussion group in two days.
The Koskiusko had a personnel complement the size of a small city or large orbital station, and the officer list alone was as large as the crew of any normal ship. Esmay knew that, in the intellectual sense, but when she saw the mass of ensigns jamming the lecture hall and crowding the passage outside, numbers became experience.
“You’re not all in the tactics discussion group, surely,” she said to Ensign Dettin, who had offered to introduce her.
“No, sir. But a lot of others wanted to come—I’ll have to shift some of them out, because they’re overloading the compartment . . .” She could see that. All the seats had been taken long ago; ensigns were crowded knee to knee in front, and were sitting squashed together in the aisles and in back. They were jamming the passage outside, too.
She watched Dettin trying to shoo them back out, to no avail. She should, she realized, have told someone more senior about this . . . if she’d thought it would be more than a dozen or so ensigns, she would have. Dettin wasn’t getting anywhere, and it was her responsibility. She reached for the microphone. “Excuse me,” she said. Silence fell, chopping off words in mid-utterance. “How many of you are regular members of the tactics discussion group?”
A few hands went up, about what she’d expected originally.
“This meeting was scheduled for that group,” Esmay said. “We can’t have a mob scene like this; it’s not safe. Those of you who are not members of the discussion group will have to leave, until we’re sure we have seating for that group, and then we’ll see how many others we can accommodate.”
Low mutters of protest, but these were ensigns and she was a full lieutenant now. Squirming awkwardly, those crammed into the aisles began to stand up; those in front waited, perhaps hoping for a reprieve, but Esmay gave them a stern look. Slowly, more awkwardly than necessary, they heaved themselves up and shuffled out. She could hear raised voices from the passage, but first things first. Some of those in seats were now standing; some sat as if glued in place. She hoped those were all discussion group members.
“Ensign Dettin.” He looked mildly embarrassed. “Make sure all the discussion group have seats—you know them all, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When they’re seated, and if it’s agreeable to the others, I don’t mind having any spare seats filled. But that’s all.”
“Sir.” He glanced around, his lips moving as he ran down some internal list. “All here but two—they may be outside.”
“Go check on them. By name.”
He made his way up the crowded aisle and called out into the passage. A knot of ensigns congealed in the opening, and finally two more elbowed their way in. That left seats for another two dozen, Esmay figured. She wished she knew a fair way to allocate those seats, but it was too late for that. More quickly than they’d left, more ensigns came in until all seats were filled.
Dettin introduced her, excitement edging his voice. The lights dimmed, except where she stood. The eager young faces faded into a blur with highlights of eyes and teeth. She had not expected that, but after standing in the glare of flag officers’ disapproval, she was not about to crumple in a merely visual spotlight.
She had prepared a display cube with the same information given in court: the geometry of the Xavier system, the disposition of Fleet vessels, available Xavieran and civilian vessels, the number and armament of the invaders. She had been over this so many times, for her counsel and for Board of Inquiry and for the court-martial, that she could have explained in her sleep just how outnumbered Serrano had been even before Hearne defected.