Echoes Of Honor

last of the squadron and section commanders departed. 'Think any of them have figured out you slipped Commander Ashford a ringer?'

'Now when did I ever say I’d done anything of the sort, Mike?' Harmon asked her personal engineer innocently.

'You didn’t have to say a word, Skipper. Not when Ernest was grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat!'

'There’s nothing feline in my ancestry, Sir,' Takahashi objected.

'Of course not,' Commander McGyver agreed. McGyver was from Sphinx, a startlingly handsome man with platinum blond hair and a powerful physique who walked with a pronounced limp courtesy of a skiing injury which had stubbornly persisted in refusing to mend properly despite all quick heal could do. Now he smiled, even white teeth flashing in a his tanned HD-star face. 'Personally, I’ve always thought of you as having a bit more weasel than feline, Ernest,' he announced. 'Or possibly a little snake. You know—' he raised an arm and swayed it sinuously back and forth in mid-air '—the sneaky, squirm-through-the-grass-and-bite-you-on-the-butt-when-you’re-not-looking variety.'

'I wouldn’t know about snakes, Sir,' Takahashi replied. 'We don’t have them on Manticore, you know.'

'They do on Sphinx,' Stackowitz informed him. 'Of course, they’ve got legs on Sphinx, and I don’t think Old Earth snakes do. Then again, Sphinx always has been noted for the... um, peculiarities of its flora and fauna.'

'And people?' McGyver suggested genially, eyes glinting at the ops officer.

'Oh, heavens, Sir! Who would ever suggest such a thing as that?' Like Takahashi, Stackowitz was from Manticore, and her expression could scarcely have been more innocent.

'Personally,' Harmon observed, dropping untidily back into her chair and sprawling out comfortably, 'I’ve always figured Carroll must have met a treecat in an opium dream or something when he invented the Cheshire Cat.'

'And the lot of you are changing the subject,' Gearman pointed out. 'You did have Ernest cook his software, didn’t you?'

'Maybe,' Harmon allowed with a lazy smile. Which, Gearman knew, was as close as she would ever come to admitting it.

He shook his head and leaned back in his own chair. Captain Harmon wasn’t quite like any other four- striper he’d ever met. She was at least as cocky and confident as any one of the carefully selected hotshots under her command, and she had a wicked and devious sense of humor. She also possessed a downright infectious enthusiasm for her new duties and actively encouraged informality among all her officers—not just her staff— outside 'office hours.'

She should have been born two thousand years ago, he often thought, in an era when deranged individuals in flying scarves strapped on so-called 'aircraft' more fragile than a modern hang glider, but armed with machine guns, and went out hunting one another. Her training techniques were, to say the least, unconventional, as her latest ploy amply demonstrated, yet she got remarkable results, and she was very consciously and deliberately infusing her personnel with what the ancients had called the 'fighter jock' mentality.

Stackowitz had been the first to apply the term to her. Gearman had never heard of it before. He’d been forced to look the term up to figure out what it meant, but once he had, he’d had to admit it fitted Captain Harmon perfectly. And given the unconventionality of her assignment, he mused, her command style was probably entirely appropriate. Certainly none of the by-the-book types he’d served under could have accomplished as much as she had in so short a period.

He leaned back and massaged his closed eyes while he reflected on just how much all of them had accomplished in the last five months. Captain Truman and Captain Harmon could probably have given lessons to the slave-drivers who’d built Old Earth’s pyramids, but they did get the job done. And they’d managed to build a solid esprit de corps in the process.

It was a bit confusing to have two Navy captains aboard the same ship, both in command slots, even if one of them was a junior-grade and the other a senior-grade. And it could have led to dangerous confusion as to exactly whom one was speaking to or of in an emergency, which explained why Harmon was almost always referred to as the 'COLAC,' the brand-new acronym someone had coined for 'Commanding Officer, LACs.' Harmon had resisted it at first, on the grounds that it sounded too much like 'colic,' but it had stuck. It still sounded odd, but it was beginning to seem less so, and it certainly made it perfectly clear who you were talking about. (Ernest Takahashi’s innocent suggestion that if the Captain objected to 'Commanding Officer, LACs,' they might try 'Commanding Officer, Wing' instead had been rejected with astonishing speed. Even more astonishingly, the lieutenant had survived making it.)

The new title was also only a tiny part of all the adjustments and new departures Minotaur and her company had been forced to deal with. For the first time in modern naval history—the first time in almost two thousand years, in fact—the 'main battery' of a unit which had to be considered a capital ship did not operate directly from that ship in action... and the ship’s captain didn’t control it. Gearman couldn’t imagine a better choice for Minotaur’s CO than Alice Truman. She had the flexibility and the confidence, not to mention the experience, to grasp the changes in the RMN’s traditional command arrangements which the introduction of the LAC-carrier implied, and he wasn’t sure how many other captains could have said the same thing. But the fact was that once Minotaur’s LACs were launched, Jackie Harmon—a mere captain (JG)—had under her command twice as many energy weapons and six and a half times as many missile tubes as the skipper of a Reliant—class battlecruiser. Not only that, but Minotaur’s only real function after launching her brood was to get the hell out of the way while Harmon and her squadron COs got on with business.

That required a genuine partnership between Truman and Harmon. There was no question as to who was in command, but Truman had to be smart enough to know when a call properly belonged to Harmon, and the two of them had worked out the CO’s and COLAC’s spheres of authority and responsibility with remarkably little friction. More than that, they were the ones who got to make up The Book on carrier ops as they went, and they’d written those spheres into it. By the time the next LAC-carrier commissioned, its skipper would already know how the areas of authority were supposed to break down.

And for all intents and purposes, Gearman was getting to write the Book for LAC engineers. His position as Harmon’s engineer aboard Harpy (still known officially by her call sign of 'Gold One') made him her de facto staff engineer, as well, and he had to admit that he felt like a kid on Christmas whenever he contemplated the marvelous new toys the Navy had given him.

The Shrikes were sweet little ships, with the latest generation of inertial compensator and a max acceleration rate which had to be seen to be believed. And the systems engineered into them—! The demanding cycle of exercises Truman and Harmon had laid on seemed to be demonstrating the fundamental soundness of the doctrine ATC had worked out for them, although a few holes had already been detected and repaired, and the hardware itself performed almost flawlessly.

But what had come as the greatest surprise to him were the differences the change in power plants made. He’d known what they were going to be—intellectually, at least—but that had been very different from the practical experience, and he sometimes found himself wondering just how many other things that everyone 'knew' were true were nothing of the sort. In a very real sense, the best thing Grayson had done for the Star Kingdom was to force people in places like the Bureau of Ships to reconsider some of those 'known facts' in a new light, he reflected, and wondered how long it would be before BuShips did decide to start building fission plants into at least their smaller starships.

Now that he’d been exposed to the theory behind them, he could see why such reactors had been genuinely dangerous in their early, primitive incarnations back on Old Earth (or, for that matter, their reinvented early, primitive incarnations back on Grayson). Of course, most new technologies—or even established ones—were dangerous if they were misused or improperly understood. And it was obvious from the history books which BuShips had dug up when it wrote the training syllabus for the new plants that the original fission pioneers on Old Earth had misunderstood, or at least misestimated, some of the downsides of their work. Gearman was at a loss to understand how anyone could have blithely set out to build up huge stocks of radioactive wastes when they had absolutely no idea how to get rid of the stuff. On the other hand,