“We’ll have to recruit. Maybe in other star systems, like Taroa. A lot of people there are probably eager to leave right now.” Iceni gave Marphissa a half smile. “This battleship is going to need a commander. Any suggestions?”
“I… will have to go through personnel files for the other field-grade mobile forces commanders available to us—”
“Kommodor Marphissa, this is where you’re supposed to say something like ‘I would be honored if you would consider me for such an assignment.’”
Marphissa stared at her. “Two months ago, I hadn’t even commanded a heavy cruiser.”
“And two months ago, I was a CEO, not a president. The individual in command of this battleship has to be someone I trust, someone who can handle the responsibility, and someone who can serve as my senior mobile forces commander.” And someone who isn’t too ambitious. If you had immediately volunteered yourself, you might not have been offered the assignment. “If you want it, the job’s yours.”
“I am honored by your trust and confidence in me, Madam President. Yes. I would be pleased to accept such an assignment.” She looked around again, this time with a growing sense of ownership visible in her eyes. “B-78. Somehow it seems it should have more of a name than that.”
“Oh? Like the Alliance does? The Inexplicable or the Undesirable or the Insufferable?”
Marphissa grinned. “The crews already give the mobile units nicknames.”
“I know. When I was a subexecutive, I was on heavy cruiser C-333. The line workers called it the Cripple Three when they thought no officer could hear them.”
“The crew on C-448 call the cruiser the Double Eight. If our warships are going to have names, don’t they deserve better names than that?”
“Like what?” Iceni waved around the bridge. “What should B-78 be called?”
Kommodor Marphissa looked slowly about her, then back at Iceni. “B-78 will be the flagship of the Midway Star System?”
“Of course.”
“We could call it the Midway. Battleship Midway. I’m certain she would proudly represent that name.”
“Hmmm.” She? Give a ship a name, and people immediately started talking about it as if it were a living thing. But, then, the line workers, the crews, had always done that, too. About every ten years or so in the past someone higher up would propose formally naming mobile units, citing intangibles like morale and unit cohesion, but the proposals had always died in the bureaucracy, which cited cost, the lack of proven concrete benefits, and the redundancy of giving a name to something that already had a perfectly good unit number. One of the few cases where bureaucrats have repeatedly objected to redundancy. And they killed some of my proposals, too, on equally arbitrary grounds. It would be nice to make this happen knowing how unhappy it would make the bean counters. “I’ll consider it.”
“Kommodor!”
Marphissa clenched her jaw. “There’s never any rest, is there?” she commented, then accepted the call. “Here. I’m on the bridge of the battleship.”
“There’s something happening on the mobile forces facility.”
“Something?”
“Internal and external explosions, Kommodor.”
Iceni tapped her own comm unit. “Colonel Rogero, get someone up here fast to watch the bridge. I need to get back over to the C-448.”
Settling into her seat on the bridge of the heavy cruiser, Iceni called up a close-in look at the mobile forces facility. Though that was orbiting the gas giant just like the battleship, it was distant enough to be almost invisible around the curve of the planet and no threat to the ships with Iceni.
But something was definitely happening there. “We don’t have comms that might indicate what’s going on?”
“There’s fighting taking place,” the specialist currently occupying the operations console offered.
“Is there?” Iceni put all the crushing force of a CEO’s sarcasm into that reply.
Marphissa turned to face all her specialists. “Find out who is fighting and any indications of why. Someone on there must be talking to someone else.”
“President Iceni?”
“Yes, Colonel Rogero.”
“I understand there is fighting on the mobile forces facility. Will you require any of my soldiers to conduct operations there?”
That was a very reasonable question. Iceni felt like slapping herself at having forgotten for a moment that she had ground forces available.
But only three squads. And that mobile forces facility might not be large by shipyard standards, but it was damned big by most other criteria. “Do we have any idea how many people are on that facility?”
The operations specialist, perhaps trying to make up for his earlier gaff, answered her quickly. “That design should have a standard base-occupancy level of six hundred, with up to one thousand more possible based on current work under way.”
“I’ll need more ammunition,” Colonel Rogero said. “If that facility actually has that many workers on it.”
“There’s no sign of other ships being worked on,” Marphissa said. “If we could see inside the primary dock—”
“We have a blowout on the primary dock,” the operations specialist announced as the information flashed onto their displays. “Something blew up inside. Our systems are estimating a Hunter-Killer with partial core collapse.”
“That’s as good as a look inside. It means there is nothing inside that dock,” Marphissa said to Iceni. “Nothing left, that is. Nothing left of the dock, either.”
“Somebody was trying to get away,” Iceni guessed. “But who?”
“Madam President, we have a message for you from the facility.”
“Show me.” Iceni saw the window pop up before her, revealing a stern-looking woman in the uniform of a senior maintenance line worker.
“This is… this is Stephani Ivaskova. I am a free worker!”
Oh, damn. That’s not good.
“We have taken this facility from the ISS and from the Syndicate Worlds. Our workers’ committee is in charge. We want you to… to recognize our control!”
Iceni waited a moment longer to see if Free Worker Ivaskova was done, then replied. Since the orbiting mobile forces facility was only a couple of light-seconds distant, the delay in communications wouldn’t really be noticeable. “This is President Iceni of the Midway Star System. We have no reason to attack you as long as you refrain from any actions against us.”
“You… whatever president means, we don’t want any more CEOs or executives telling us what to do.”
“This isn’t my star system,” Iceni said. “I have no interest in trying to control anyone here.”
“You are holding property belonging to us,” Ivaskova declared. “We insist that you turn it over to our workers’ committee.”
“What property would that be?”
“The battleship.”
Iceni shook her head, keeping her expression unrevealing. “We took that battleship from the Syndicate Worlds, not from you. I intend keeping it. As soon as we know it’s safe to move, we’ll take it to Midway to finish readying it for full operational capability.”
Ivaskova turned her head, talking to what seemed to be more than one other person, the off-side conversation rendered deliberately unintelligible by the comm software. Based on the changes in Ivaskova’s expression and the way her gestures became more and more emphatic, the talk rapidly escalated into a vigorous argument of some kind.