Ashes Of Victory

devotion boded ill for his future record. As for the final member of the crew, Lieutenant Joe Buckley, the tac officer, the jury was still out. He was very good at his job, and had demonstrated a positive genius for tweaking and modifying his weapon systems' software, but the consensus in the squadron was that he could not possibly be as innocent as his earnest expression and manner seemed to indicate. He was, after all, assigned to Cutthroat, and everyone knew what that meant.

Actually, Tremaine admitted to himself with an inner smile, Roden had managed to hammer his personal collection of misfits into exactly the sort of 'LAC jocks' Captain Harmon had envisioned. Their record in sims and drills was second to none, Cutthroat's engineering readiness was the second best in the wing, and they had that swaggering confidence, verging on arrogance, which was the mark of an elite small-craft crew. Indeed, Tremaine was often bemused by how well they performed, since they never seemed to have the time to waste on things like practice. That would have dragged them away from their true passion, for the lot of them seemed addicted to cards, and particularly to the ancient game of spades, which they played with special fervor and bloodthirstiness. As a rule, they seemed to resent the intrusion of anything so ephemeral as an interstellar war on important things like setting the high-bidder in a hand of cutthroat, and Bolgeo and Paulk, the two who'd actually come up with the idea for locating the sternwall generator, were the worst of the lot.

Of course, it was an... offbeat approach, which was probably no more than was to be expected of those two. Indeed, it was hardly surprising that the more orthodox thinkers at BuShips had never considered such an outre notion, no matter how much sense it made once someone actually suggested it.

Sidewall generators were too fragile and too valuable to expose to damage. Everyone knew they had to be put safely behind armor, where a freak hit would be less likely to destroy them and open a deadly chink in a warship's defenses. That meant they always went inside the hull, since the armor, by definition, was on the outside of the hull. But as Bolgeo, Paulk, and Roden pointed out, a LAC had no armor. There was no point in it, since no one could armor a ship that small to stand up against heavy weapons fire while still having the internal volume to carry a worthwhile weapons load of its own. So if there was no armor to put the generator behind in the first place, there was no logical requirement to put the generator inside the ship, either.

Harkness and Tremaine had checked their numbers, and it certainly looked as if the three of them were on to something. The problem of interference with the after beta nodes would require some careful number crunching, but it was the matter of power supply which seemed likely to pose the real difficulties. Nice as the new LACs' fission plants were, they simply couldn't produce the power out of current generating capacity for everything that had to be done in the heat of combat... especially in a Shrike or Shrike-B, with its battlecruiser-sized graser mount. The bow-wall, like the graser itself, was actually fed from a massive superconductor capacitor, and one of the flight engineer's jobs was to see to it that any of his pile's output not being used for anything else was diverted into maintaining the charge on the capacitors. To make the sternwall work, one of the other capacitors would have to be tapped (with the potential for draining it doing one job just at the moment it was urgently needed for its originally intended purpose), or else yet another dedicated capacitor of its own would have to be crammed into (or onto, possibly) a hull that was already packed like an e-rat can.

'They really think they've got the node interference and wedge deformation problems solved?' Tremaine asked Harkness finally.

'Tim says so,' the warrant officer replied, and shrugged. 'He's the one with the hands-on experience. Commander Roden's more into the theory and enthusiasm, but Tim's the one who's run up the actual schematics, and he says he's confident.'

'Um.' Tremaine rubbed his nose again. 'And the power feeds?'

'They're talking about running two taps, one to the graser ring and one to the ring for the bow-wall. That way they could siphon off power from either of them and balance the load rather than have to choose between draining one of the other systems completely or doing without the sternwall.'

'Or they could end up draining two critical systems.'

'Yep.' Harkness nodded, then shrugged. 'Other way to look at it, though, Skip, is that if the shit's so deep they're draining both the other capacitors just trying to cover their asses while they bug the hell out, it ain't real likely they're gonna need any power for offensive action, now is it?'

'You could just have a point there, Chief.' Tremaine thought another moment, then shrugged. 'All right. Go find Bolgeo, and tell him to round up Roden and Paulk. I want to talk to all three of them and go over their numbers in person. After that, I'll write up the memo and route it to Captain Adib and Admiral Truman. In the meantime, I'll authorize you and Bolgeo to start building the thing out of the wing's own resources.'

'Good enough,' Harkness said with obvious satisfaction, then grinned. 'You know, Sir, I think the thing I may like best about this job is the machine shops. I got all those gorgeous new toys to play with, and the Navy actually pays me to do it! It don't get a lot better than that, Skipper.'

'If you're happy, I'm happy, Chief,' Tremaine told him expansively. 'Just don't get too carried away. This monster of Roden and Bolgeo's isn't going to be cheap, and if it doesn't work, I'm going to have a real hard time explaining to the LogCom people where all the parts for it went.'

'Don't worry, Sir. If I build the thing, it'll damned well work. And if it don't, I'll personally take Bolgeo's spades' deck away from him until he makes it work!'

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

'And it's been one thing after another for months now,' the slender, dark-faced woman on the display groused. 'We're still catching flak from the attack on Zanzibar. The Caliph's ambassador was in here just yesterday to see Dame Elaine and press for `clarification' on the status of the reinforced picket. Which really meant he wanted her to swear a blood oath to leave it there forever. Which she couldn't, of course. They needed to talk directly to the Earl, not to one of the permanent undersecretaries. And even if Dame Elaine had the authority to make official policy commitments, the Duke's made it clear to everyone in the Alliance that something like that is a military decision, which means Ambassador Makarem ought to have one of his attaches sounding out your bosses' staff over at Admiralty House, not us!'

Rear Admiral Aristides Trikoupis, GSN (who had been a captain junior-grade in the Royal Manticoran Navy just over three years before) reclined on the couch in the admiral's day cabin aboard GNS Isaiah MacKenzie and wiggled his sock toes in shameless luxury as he viewed the letter from his wife. Mirdula Trikoupis was a senior-level member of the Foreign Office's permanent staff, and the expression on her lively face was just a tad on the disgusted side.

'And then certain individuals who shall remain nameless started trying to pressure us for details of privileged communications between the Earl and the Graysons — and hinting at all sorts of dire consequences the next time the government changes hands if we didn't cough up what they wanted!' She grimaced with more than a hint of true anger. 'I swear, Aristides, sometimes I want to run out into the street and strangle the next three politicians I meet with my bare hands!'

Trikoupis chuckled aloud at that. Not because he didn't share her longing to permanently remove certain of those 'nameless' individuals — I wonder if they were staffers for High Ridge, New Kiev, or Descroix? Had to be one of them —but at the image that flashed through his brain. Unlike most of the Manticoran officers on loan to the Grayson Space Navy, Trikoupis, at just a hair over a hundred and seventy centimeters, did not tower over the native Graysons of his crews... but he looked downright tall next to his diminutive wife. Mirdula was fourteen centimeters shorter than he was, and the thought of her strangling politicians — preferably one with each hand, simultaneously, while holding their toes well clear of the ground — appealed mightily to him.

Strictly speaking, Mirdula had no business sharing that sort of information with anyone outside her office, but she'd been careful to use their private encryption (which was supplied by the Foreign Office), and her letters to him traveled only aboard high-security Navy courier boats. Besides, he'd spent three prewar years as a naval attache on Haven, and his Foreign Office and ONI clearances remained in force. Still, he made a mental note to