Mission of Honor

MacDerment were good, solid officers, but they were undeniably still a bit young for their rank. There was a lot of that going around, and while he was confident in their competence, there was no harm providing a little adult supervision. By the same token, he was equally confident that whichever one of them he chose to accompany, it was the other one Murphy would choose to drop straight into the crapper. (Both of those beliefs, he supposed, might owe a little something to his eleven years' enlisted experienced before the Corps sent him off to OTC.)

Of course, the fact that he'd assigned himself to Alpha Company also meant that Alpha Company had been assigned to board SLNS Anton von Leeuwenhoek , which happened to be the flagship of one Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. Which also explained Fariсas' presence.

At the moment, Ingebrigtsen was involved in a quiet conversation with Master Sergeant Clifton Palmarocchi, Alpha Company's senior noncom. Palmarocchi had been around the block and back again, and the chunky, muscular master sergeant, with his thinning fair hair and pronounced Gryphon accent would have made an admirable illustration for the term 'grizzled veteran.' That was just fine with Markiewicz, especially when he contemplated the absurd youthfulness of the junior officer standing at Ingebrigtsen's elbow and nodding sagely at whatever she was saying. The captain might be young, but Lieutenant Hector Lindsay looked like he ought to be playing mumblety-peg in a schoolyard somewhere. Well, maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad enough. In fact, Lindsay was still a few months shy of his twentieth birthday, standard, fresh out of OCS, which made him even younger than Lieutenant Fariсas ( no ancient graybeard himself), and he'd had 'his' platoon for just under two months, having come aboard literally asRigel was pulling out for Talbott.

There was a reason, the major suspected, Ingebrigtsen and Palmarocchi had both ended up accompanying First Platoon instead of either of her other platoons. And, he admitted to himself, if he'd thought about it, he would have picked this pinnace to help keep an eye on Lindsay. The boy was smart enough, and motivated as hell, but he was so shiny and new that it hurt.

Well, Markiewicz decided, glancing at his armor's HUD, where the pinnace's flight engineer was feeding him a duplicate of the pilot's HUD, we'll be finding out shortly how well this is all going to work .

* * *

'Good seal, Ma'am,' Petty Officer 2/c John Pettigrew announced as a green light indicated a solid mating with Charles Babbage 's Emergency Airlock Number 117. 'According to the diagnostic ping, the lock's operable, but it looks like it's running on emergency local power.'

'Thank you, PO,' Abigail acknowledged, then glanced at Gutierrez.

'Let's get them moving, Lieutenant,' she said far more formally than she normally spoke to him.

'Yes, Ma'am.'

Gutierrez took time to salute before sealing his helmet, which, Abigail knew, was his equivalent, under the circumstances, of pitching a tantrum. He hadn't liked the decision to place him in tactical command of the boarding party instead of staying where he was supposed to be, watching her back, one little bit. Unfortunately the fact thatTristram carried no Marine detachment made ex-Sergeant Gutierrez the closest thing to a Marine CO Naomi Kaplan had available. That, coupled with the fact that Abigail was the only one of her Navy officers with any experience in ground combat was what had determined who would command Tristram 's boarding party.

Everyone, including (perhaps even especially) Lieutenant Abigail Hearns hoped combat experience would be completely irrelevant to their present mission. The entire reason Tristram had been assigned responsibility for Charles Babbage was the sheer extent of the superdreadnought's devastating damage. Although Abigail's little command was technically a boarding party, their real function was search and rescue, and any Solly with a functional brain was going to be simply delighted to see them.

Unfortunately, as she'd pointed out to Corbett, they couldn't rely on the functionality of any survivors' brains. In fact, it was entirely possible that what they'd been through could have thoroughly unhinged some of them, in which case all bets were off and all of Matteo Gutierrez's experience might be required, after all.

He understood that as well as she did, but he also understood that it meant he was going to be concentrating on running the boarding party's entire security element instead of solely watching over one Abigail Hearns. And while he was far too professional to object, it was obvious he didn't see any reason to pretend—with Abigail, at least—that he was at all amused.

Well, you're just going to have to deal with it, Matteo , she thought, smiling affectionately at his broad back.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Evgeny Markiewicz had never thought much of officers who fretted over details which should have been left in the hands of their noncoms. He'd seen entirely too many examples of that from the noncom's perspective, which meant he knew exactly how much it pissed off the noncoms in question. What was worse, it represented a misuse of the officer's time and attention. He was supposed to be in charge of managing his command, however big or small it might be, not allowing himself to become absorbed in the sorts of details which could all too easily distract him from that management function.

At the moment, he found that somewhat more difficult than usual to remember.

The boat bay aboard SLNS Anton von Leeuwenhoek , Admiral Keeley O'Cleary's flagship, was larger than it would have been the aboard a Manticoran superdreadnought. Partly that was because Solarian ships carried greater numbers of small craft. That had been true even before Manticoran crews had been downsized, although the difference was even more marked these days. For another thing, Solarian small craft tended to be larger than their Manticoran counterparts. According to his briefing, they didn't carry any more personnel or cargo—in fact, they carried slightly less—but they had a longer designed operating radius, and their basic designs were much older and hadn't profited from the RMN's wartime emphasis on greater operational efficiency and component reduction.

At the moment, all those small craft, aside from two purely reaction-drive cutters, were absent, however. By this time, they were sitting obediently in orbit around Flax, under the watchful eyes—and weapons—of Commodore Terekhov's cruisers, and the boat bay was a huge, gaping cavern in their absence. A cavern which looked even larger with only a trio of Manticoran pinnaces docked in it like lonely interlopers.

Captain Ingebrigtsen had lt Lieutenant Lindsay and Platoon Sergeant Francine Harper handle First Platoon's debarkation, and Markiewicz had been pleased by the way Ingebrigtsen managed not to hover. For that matter, he'd been pleased by the way Lindsay had let Harper get on with it. But now, as the platoon's forty-four men and women formed up in Leeuwenhoek 's boat bay gallery, he recognized Ingebrigtsen's itchy expression. He ought to, given that he shared the same ignoble temptation to start fooling around with those details he was supposed to stay clear of.

Fortunately, young Lindsay seemed unaware of the pair of incipient backseat drivers somehow managing to restrain themselves. The lieutenant glanced around, then looked at Sergeant Harper.

'Let's get a squad on each of the lift banks, Frankie,' he said.

'Aye, Sir!' Harper replied, and barked a few, crisp commands. The platoon quickly and smoothly unraveled into its constituent squads, and Markiewicz gave a mental nod of approval. It was a simple evolution, but the confidence in Lindsay's voice and the briskness with which he'd acted were both good signs.

And, unlike one Major Markiewicz, Lindsay appeared completely immune to the temptation to micromanage his platoon sergeant.

'Bay secure, Ma'am,' Lindsay reported a moment later to Ingebrigtsen.

'Thank you, Hector,' the captain replied gravely, and keyed her battle armor's com. 'Bay secure,' she announced. 'Second Platoon, come ahead.'

'Aye, aye, Ma'am,' Lieutenant Sylvester Jackson, responded almost instantly. 'On our way.'

The second pinnace's hatch cycled open, and Jackson's platoon swam briskly down the personnel tube. They fell in just inside the gallery, and Jackson—four years older than Lindsay, with sandy hair and a pronounced