“But surely you suspected—”
Esmay snorted. “Suspected? Listen—my real concern was stuff disappearing out of personnel lockers. Minor theft. I didn’t worry about the captain . . . the captain was the captain, doing her job of commanding the ship. I was a mere jig, doing my assigned job, which was servicing the automatic internal scanners and trying to find out who was getting into the lockers, and how. When the . . . mutiny started on Despite, I was so surprised I nearly got shot before I caught on.” She waited for the nervous giggles to die down.
“Yeah—like that. It was ridiculous . . . I couldn’t believe it. Nor could most of us. That’s why conspirators are always a step ahead of the people who get real work done . . . they can count on that surprise.”
“But how did Serrano get command?” someone asked.
“I can only tell you what I heard,” Esmay said. “Apparently, she and some of her former crew got aboard by some ruse, asked to talk to Garrivay in his office. By good fortune—or perhaps she had some way of knowing—some of the other conspirators were there. She and her crew . . . killed them.”
“Right away? You mean they didn’t try to talk them out of it?”
Esmay let that lie in a stillness that was as scornful as her own. When the stirring began, she ended it by speaking. “When someone has determined on treason—is commanding a ship, and planning to deliver helpless civilians to the enemy—I doubt any moral homilies would change his mind. Commander Serrano made a command decision; she eliminated the most senior conspirators as quickly as possible. Even then it wasn’t easy.”
Esmay put up new displays. “Now—Captain Hearne took Despite—with me, and the rest of the crew—quickly out of Xavier system. Our exec was also involved, but the next junior officer was both loyal, and on the bridge to hear Commander Serrano’s transmission to Captain Hearne, requesting her return to station and her assistance in defending Xavier. He actually began the mutiny, appealing to the bridge crew . . .” She stopped, flooded in memories of the next few hours. The contradictory orders on the ship’s internal communications, the total confusion, the time it took—which now seemed inexplicable—for the loyalists to realize that a mutiny was necessary, and that they’d have to use deadly force on their crewmates.
“From the tactical point of view,” she said, forcing all that back down, “Commander Serrano faced a very difficult task. The Benignity force arrived almost simultaneously with her assumption of command. Had she waited even a few more hours, it would have been impossible. The Benignity force—” Esmay outlined its specifications, reminding her audience of the usual tactics used by Benignity strike forces. Now, describing decisions and actions she had not personally witnessed, she found it easier to be calm and logical. This ship here, these over there, expected and unexpected choices of maneuver . . . results, neatly tabulated without reference to the people whose lives had just been changed forever.
All too soon, she had to come back to her own experience. She skipped over the internal battle for control of Despite. She had relived that too many times for the court to do it again, for these callow youngsters. But they needed to know how the battle ended, including the mistakes she had made.
“We came in too fast,” she said, displaying yet another visual. “My concern was that we might arrive too late, and I assumed that any insertion barrage would be sufficiently dispersed. As you know, calculation of real elapsed time in multiple FTL hops is difficult at best—but the error is usually negative, not positive. As it happened, we made it through insertion safely, and skip-jumped to here—” she pointed. “Without dumping enough residual vee. We were short-crewed, with some damage to the nav computers, so I couldn’t get a quick solution to a microjump that would have allowed the right angular motion. So . . . we blew past Xavier, and in that interim Paradox took fatal damage.” More than eighteen hundred dead. Her fault. War left no margin for mistakes. She remembered the desperate scramble on the bridge of her ship, the bridge crew fighting to get control, to get a jump solution that would let them get back in time to do some good.
“We got a jump solution,” she said, leaving out the rest of it, that instant when she had to accept it, with the risk, or not. The risk had been substantial—the confidence interval on that very unorthodox jump was broad enough that they could have gone right into Xavier itself. “And we came out of jump with a clear shot up the rear of the Benignity command cruiser.” And a vector that gave them only one chance for that shot. The crew that had resented losing a chance to become the Sector gunnery champions had made their shot in the narrow window . . . and then had managed to reposition Despite in a stable orbit.
“The Board of Inquiry,” Esmay said, “did not approve of the means, though they liked the results.” She didn’t want to discuss that; she hurried on to show how the Xavieran defenses had contributed: the suicidal use of phase cannon on a shuttle, the improvised mines, little Grogon’s few telling shots, the yacht’s astonishing defeat of the killer-ship.
“Only because they weren’t expected,” Esmay pointed out. “The Benignity ship intended ambush—post-battle analysis picked up enough transmissions to know that—and simply didn’t know the yacht was there. When it shut down active systems to lie low for several hours, it was an easy target.”
“What difference would it have made if Despite had also been in the Xavier system the whole time?”
An intelligent question, but difficult. “By the ship stats, it would have improved the odds ratio only about fifteen percent. To my own knowledge, Despite had the best weapons performance in the Sector: whatever Hearne’s failings, she demanded and got quick and accurate fire from her crew. But if it had stayed, it would have been a known quantity, and Commander Serrano’s force would still have been outnumbered and outgunned. I haven’t seen any of the senior analysts’ reports, but my own guess is that its contribution throughout the long battle would have been less than its effectiveness as an unexpected opponent at the end. That is, however, only my guess—it does not change the fact that the lack of another hull severely limited Commander Serrano’s choices of action—and that its absence was the result of treason.”
Silence, attentive and almost breathless. Esmay waited. Finally someone shifted, a very audible rasp of clothing against the seat cushions, and that broke their immobility. Ensign Dettin clambered up to take the podium, and thank her for her talk. Hands rose for more questions, but Esmay caught sight of senior rank in the rear. When had they come in? She hadn’t noticed . . . but certainly no ensign guarding the door from other ensigns would refuse entry to the handful of majors and lieutenant commanders gathered there.
Dettin saw them, finally, and stopped short in his closing remarks. “Uh . . . sir . . . ?”
Commander Atarin, Esmay finally recognized as he moved out of the dimness back there and into the light. “I presume you’d be willing to give the same briefing to senior officers?”
A shiver of apprehension ran down her backbone. She couldn’t tell if he was angry, or amused; she didn’t know whether to apologize or explain. Both were bad ideas, her family heritage reminded her. “Of course, sir.” She choked back the automatic qualifiers: if she wasn’t really qualified, why was she showing off to the ensigns?