I told my NCOs to keep their helmets on, then removed my helmet and went to meet the duty officer. I met him on the ramp, saluted, and said, “Requesting permission to come aboard, sir.”
The officer returned my salute, and said, “Permission granted, Captain.” With that simple ceremony, we took up residence in the Scutum-Crux Fleet.
Rear Admiral Lawrence Thorne met me as I came off the transport. He stood with an entourage of no less than seventeen officers. I counted them. You can tell a lot about an officer by the number of remora fish trailing behind him.
One of the men in Thorne’s group had an anchor and two stars on his collar—the insignia of a master chief petty officer. The rest wore eagles, clusters, and bars. These were high-ranking officers. Thorne stood out because he was the only officer with a star. His single star identified him as a lower-half rear admiral.
I could not help but wonder at the Scutum-Crux Fleet’s drop in stature. Years ago, when I arrived as a young corporal, a five-star admiral had command of the fleet. He was replaced by Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an upper-half rear admiral with two stars. With Thorne in command, the fleet was down to one star. Once I took over, the stars would be replaced by the silver bars of a captain.
Admiral Thorne and his parade of officers greeted me as I stepped from the ramp. With all those younger officers trailing behind him, Thorne looked like a broken old man. My first impression of him was not good.
I saluted the admiral, and he returned my salute.
“You must be Captain Harris,” he said. “Welcome aboard, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Warshaw, see to Captain Harris’s gear.” Thorne called over his shoulder, not looking back when the one noncom in the entourage acknowledged the order. “Your men are in good hands, Captain. In the meantime, why don’t I get you up to speed with your new fleet.”
I turned to look at Warshaw. He was a master chief petty officer, the ranking enlisted man in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. He gave me a smart salute.
He was, of course, a clone, but he stood out because he looked short for a clone. He was as tall as any clone of his make, of course; but he was more squat. He had broad, bulging shoulders and a neck like a bull’s—the earmarks of a dedicated bodybuilder. The forms of his biceps and triceps filled his sleeves.
Warshaw barked rapid-fire orders to his men. Watching the master chief, I got the feeling that he pretty much ran the show on this ship.
“Perhaps we should begin your tour, Captain,” Thorne said to me, interrupting my thoughts.
The docking bay of the Kamehameha was brightly lit, every bit as immaculate as I remembered it, and large enough to hold twenty-five transports. Pershing might have been able to fit half of his cruiser in this docking bay, and the other half in the second docking bay on the other side of the ship.
As we crossed the deck, Thorne said, “Your crew is as competent as any crew that has ever flown this fleet. We spent the last year training them.
“There is an all-clone crew manning the bridge at this very moment. There are enlisted-man crews flying every ship in the fleet. At this point, my officers are acting in an advisory role.”
“Is that so?” I asked, unable to come up with a more interested response.
“You have a full complement of fighter pilots, all clones, all noncommissioned officers. It’s a shame we didn’t experiment with clone pilots earlier, this fleet has never run so smoothly,” the admiral said in a loud voice, sounding like a salesman with a hearing problem. After a moment I realized that he was speaking as much for the benefit of the remora fish entourage as for mine.
He stopped and handed me a folder. “This is your new chain of command. You’ll want to meet with your staff as soon as possible. There are a million things that can go wrong transferring command of a fleet, and I want this transfer to go as smoothly as possible.”
“You sound anxious to get home,” I said in as friendly a voice as I could. I did not want the admiral to know just how bitter I felt.
Thorne was an old man with a wrinkled face and alert blue eyes. He heard my comment and detected the disrespect hidden underneath my words. His smile did not falter, but his eyes narrowed. “Captain, I have officers who would kill to get home. Some of those boys thought they might never see home again. You bet they want to get home.”
Since I had presumably been stationed here for the remainder of my life, I felt less than sympathetic. I took the folder without opening it.
Thorne turned and continued down the hall. He looked to be in his sixties. His hair had gone all white and thinned around the corners. Instead of a beard, he had powdery stubble on his cheeks and chin. Tall but bent by age, he had a stooped back, though his scrawny shoulders were as straight across as lumber.
Admiral Thorne’s entourage followed behind as we left the hangar and entered a corridor that led all the way across the ship. “You once served on this ship, did you not?” Thorne asked.
“I did, sir,” I said.
“Was that under Admiral Klyber? I was assigned to the Scutum-Crux Inner Fleet when Klyber combined the fleets,” Thorne said.
I was on the Kamehameha when Klyber combined the fleets and said so. Then, in an attempt to show polite interest, I asked, “Have you been reassigned to the Earth Fleet?” I knew the Navy would not bother assigning a fossil like Admiral Thorne to another fleet, his career was over.
To his credit, Admiral Thorne did not take well to flattery. “The new Navy has almost as much room for overage officers as it has for clones. They’re putting us both out to pasture.” Then he lowered his voice to a croak, and said, “The difference between my new assignment and yours is that the Pentagon does not see me as a threat.”
I wondered if I had heard him correctly. This was something I had not expected—honesty.
As I sorted this out, Thorne dismissed his entourage. They scattered in every direction like a flock of birds. When two officers lingered, he growled, “Did you need something?”
One man in particular, a captain, looked stunned, even flustered. “But sir, Admiral Brocius said …”
Apparently the soon-to-retire Lawrence Thorne did not give a flying speck what Admiral Brocius might or might not have said. “This is a conference for fleet commanders, Captain Stone. The last time I checked, you weren’t on the invite list.”
“But, sir, Admiral …”
“I give the orders on this ship,” Thorne said in a voice so sarcastic it did not sound like something that could come from an old man’s mouth. He licked his lips. “And here is a direct order, ‘You are dismissed.’”
Stone took a step, stopped, took another step, and stopped again. Confusion showed on his face. He had orders from a higher authority than this broken-down admiral, but the officer who had issued them was too far away for an appeal.
“Don’t make me repeat myself, Stone,” Thorne said, now raising his voice.
Captain Stone turned smartly and strode away; quite the dignified officer. Once he disappeared around a corner, Admiral Thorne said, “Have they told you that rubbish about commanding the most powerful fleet in the galaxy?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Did they tell you the entire arm would be at your command?”
“Something along that line,” I said.
“You do know it’s all bullshit?”
“I had that feeling,” I said.
Thorne laughed. “They tried to sell me the same line. Let me give you the skinny, Harris. Even if everything goes according to plan, you’re still stuck out here a trillion miles from home. You and your men are going to be marooned out here, and nothing is ever going to change that.”