Mission of Honor

not Article Ten figures into your thinking, as well.'

Paulo felt his lips trying to purse in a silent whistle as that last salvo landed. Obviously McGillicuddy had heard even more—and was even more pissed off—than he'd thought. From the little Paulo had seen of her, she didn't seem like the sort who normally screamed at a subordinate—even a stupid subordinate—in front of that subordinate's juniors. The fact that Berkeley had ticked her off enough to do that was sufficiently significant on its own, but her last sentence had been so pointed not even Berkeley could miss the implication. Article Ten was the article which forbade actions or speech prejudicial to discipline and the chain of command. If Berkeley was brought up on that charge and it went into his personnel record . . . .

McGillicuddy held Berkeley's eyes for another few seconds, then nodded, glanced once at the breathlessly watching group of JGs, ensigns, and enlisted, and left without another word.

* * *

'Well, I'm undoubtedly the most unpopular officer in Weyland ,' Claudio Faraday said with an air of satisfaction. 'For that matter, I might well be the most unpopular officer in the entire Beta subsystem!'

'I think that might be going just a bit far, Sir,' Marcus Howell replied. 'At least as far as the entire subsystem's concerned. Although, now that I think about it, they probably aren't too fond of you down on Gryphon at the moment, either.'

'Nope. And I imagine I may be hearing a little something from the bean-counters back at Admiralty House, too.' Faraday sounded a bit more serious, but his air of contentment was unabated. 'We've probably just written off—what? ten percent?—of the station's life pods, after all.'

'Not to mention shutting down the entire R&D section until we get the pods recertified, Sir,' Howell pointed out respectfully.

'Oh, thank you for recalling that little detail to my attention, Marcus!'

'One of the things chiefs of staff are for, Sir.'

Faraday glowered at him, but the vice admiral didn't seem able to work up much wattage. Then he allowed his chair to come upright, planted his elbows on his desk, and leaned forward over his folded forearms.

'Actually,' he said much more seriously, 'the downtime bothers me most. But I don't expect Admiral Hemphill to kick up much dust over it. I know most people think of her as the tech weenies' tech weenie, but she's got a lot better understanding of the realities than some of her research people out here do.' He shook his head. 'Frankly, I think quite a few of them haven't figured out they're actually in the Navy and hence subject to the Service's little foibles, like making sure they're up to date on relevant emergency procedures. And even for most of the others, the thought that anyone might possibly want to hurt them never enters their minds! Which doesn't even consider the fact that genuine accidents can happen even aboard the most modern space station.'

Howell nodded. He wasn't sure he agreed with Faraday's decision to actually evacuate the space station and send all but a tiny caretaker detachment down to the planet Gryphon. He was perfectly ready to admit that the readiness state of Weyland 's disaster and evacuation planning had been, well, disastrous, though. And Faraday was certainly correct about the possibility of accidents. There hadn't been a major catastrophe aboard any of the Star Empire's main industrial platforms in decades, but there'd been several moderately severe accidents, and catastrophe was always possible, however improbable it might seem. If that had happened aboard Weyland a few weeks earlier, personnel losses might have been cataclysmic.

The series of of simulations Faraday had ordered had created a great deal of anger and frustration. At the same time, his grumpy subordinates had finally been forced to accept that he was serious about trying to get them off the station alive if something went wrong. They might not have been happy about it, but they'd at least started going through the motions with something resembling efficiency.

Of course, they'd known it was only going to be simulations , which would let them get back to work on more serious concerns after a half-hour or so of nonsense. Until this morning, that was, when the exercise had concluded with the words 'this is no sim.'

Which was basically all the warning they'd gotten before their life pods blasted out of the station and headed for Gryphon . . . whose authorities had had no more notion they might be coming than they'd had that they might be going . The planetary authorities' disaster and evacuation planning for Weyland had come up a little short, as well, with the station's personnel jammed into whatever improvised holding stations they could come up with while they tried to figure out what to do with them. Since they were supposed to already have detailed plans for doing just that, the current panetary FUBAR probably wasn't going to make Vice Admiral Faraday very popular with them when their efficiency reports—or their civilian equivalents—got written.

'All in all, a good day's work,' Faraday concluded. 'I figure we should be able to start re-docking the fabrication section's pods in a couple of days. I want to start there, at any rate.'

'May I ask why, Sir?' Howell asked with a slight sense of trepidation.

'Indeed you may,' Faraday replied with a sharklike smile. 'While we're re-docking Fabrication's pods and recertifying Research's pods, you and I, and Admiral Yeager, and a security team from ONI which just happens to've been in-system when I called this little exercise, are going to do a walk- through. We'll be sending an updated backup down to Gryphon for storage just in case. And we're also going to see just how many of Yeager's worker bees remembered to secure their classified data properly before heading for their pods.'

'Ouch!' Howell's wince wasn't entirely feigned, and Faraday chuckled nastily.

'I'm already unpopular with them, Marcus. I might as well go whole hog and kill as many birds as possible while I'm chucking stones. And I already warned Yaeger this was coming. I won't say she's looking forward to it, but she understands why I'm doing it and that I'm not going to deliberately collect any more heads than I have to.

'Which, unfortunately, doesn't mean some aren't going to roll anyway, of course.'

Howell nodded again. Some people never seemed to understand that military efficiency demanded a certain degree of ruthlessness. Military commanders weren't—or shouldn't be, at any rate—in the business of winning popularity contests. They should be in the business of promoting the efficiency, which definitely included the survivability, of the units under their command. Not only was it a CO's duty to prune away deadwood, but it was also his responsibility to make all the personnel under his command aware of the fact that he'd do that pruning, with ruthless dispatch, whenever it was required. Punishing those who screwed up in order 'to encourage the others' had been an axiom of military discipline for so many centuries because, whether it was nice or not, it worked.

Punishment may not be the best possible motivator, but it's one that works , Howell thought. And it's one any effective officer has to have in his toolbox for the times when it's the only one that will. And at least Claudio understands the nuts and bolts of positive motivation, as well. Now that he's got their attention, at least .

The chief of staff's lips twitched on the brink of a smile, but he suppressed it and paged to the next item on his electronic notepad.

'All right, Sir. I'm going to assume from what you've just said that you want us to give the immediate priority to getting the fabrication section's life pods back aboard. Having said that, though, there's the question of Engineering. In particular—'

* * *

Millions upon millions of kilometers from Vice Admiral Claudio's day cabin, shoals of missile pods continued to bore through space at twenty percent of the speed of light, and the visible disks of the star called Manticore-A and Manticore-B grew steadily larger before them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

What happened wasn't anyone's fault.