CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
0600 Hours, July 18, 2552 (Military Calendar)
UNSC Iroquois , military staging area in orbit around Sigma Octanus IV
Commander Keyes had a sinking feeling that although he had won the battle, it would be the first of many to come in the Sigma Octanus System.
He watched the four dozen other UNSC ships orbit the planet: frigates and destroyers, two carriers, and a massive repair and refitting station—more vessels than Admiral Cole had at his disposal during his four-year-long campaign to save Harvest. Admiral Stanforth had pulled out all the stops.
Although Commander Keyes was grateful for the quick and overwhelming response, he wondered why the Admiral had dedicated so many ships to the area. Sigma Octanus wasn’t strategically positioned. It had no special resources. True, the UNSC had standing orders to protect civilian lives, but the fleet was spread dangerously thin. Commander Keyes knew there were more valuable systems that needed protection.
He pushed these thoughts aside. He was sure Admiral Stanforth had his reasons. Meanwhile the repair and resupply of the Iroquois was his top priority—he didn’t want to get caught half ready if the Covenant returned.
Or rather, when they returned.
It was a curious thing: the aliens dropping their ground forces and then retreating. That was not their usual mode of operation. Commander Keyes suspected this was just an opening move in a game he didn’t yet understand.
A shadow crossed the fore camera of the Iroquois as the repair station Cradle maneuvered closer. Cradle was essentially a large square plate with engines. Large was an understatement; she was over a square kilometer. Three destroyers could be eclipsed by her shadow. The station running at full steam could refit six destroyers, three from her lower surface and three on her upper surface, within a matter of hours.
Scaffolds deployed from her surfaces to facilitate repairs. Resupply tubes, hoses, and cargo trams fed into the Iroquois . It would take the full attention of Cradle thirty hours to repair the Iroquois , however.
The aliens had not landed a single serious shot. Nonetheless, the Iroquois had almost been destroyed during the execution of what some in the fleet were already calling the “Keyes Loop.”
Commander Keyes glanced at his data pad and the extensive list of repairs. Fifteen percent of the electronic systems had to be replaced—burned out from the EMP when the Shiva missile detonated.
The Iroquois ’ engines required a full overhaul. Both coolant systems had valves that had been fused from the tremendous heat. Five of the superconducting magnets had to be replaced as well.
But most troublesome was the damage to the underside of the Iroquois . When they had told Commander Keyes what had happened, he went outside in a Longsword interceptor to personally inspect what he had done to his ship.
The underside of the Iroquois had been scraped when they passed over the prow of the alien destroyer.
He knew there was some damage . . . but was not prepared for what he saw.
UNSC destroyers had nearly two meters of titanium-a battleplate on their surfaces. Commander Keyes had abraded through all of it. He had breached every bottom deck of the Iroquois . The jagged serrated edges of the plate curled away from the wound. Men in EVA thruster packs were busy cutting off the damaged sections so new plates could be welded into place.
The underside was mirror smooth and perfectly flat. But Keyes knew that the appearance of benign flatness was deceptive. Had the angle of the Iroquois been tilted a single degree down, the force of the two ships impacting would have shorn his ship in half.
The red war stripes that had been painted on the Iroquois ’ side looked like bloody slashes. The dockmaster had privately told Commander Keyes that his crew could buff the paint off—or even repaint the war stripes, if he wanted.
Commander Keyes had politely refused the offer. He wanted them left exactly the way they were. He wanted to be reminded that while everyone had admired what he had done—it had been an act of desperation, not heroism.
He wanted to be reminded of how close a brush he had had with death.
Commander Keyes returned to the Iroquois and marched directly to his quarters.
He sat at his antique oak desk and tapped the intercom. “Lieutenant Dominique, you have the bridge for the next cycle. I am not to be disturbed.”
“Aye, Commander. Understood.”
Commander Keyes loosened his collar and unbuttoned his uniform. He retrieved the seventy-year-old bottle of Scotch that his father had given him from the bottom drawer, and then poured four centimeters into a plastic cup.
He had to attend to an even more unpleasant task: what to do about Lieutenant Jaggers.
Jaggers had exhibited borderline cowardice, insubordination and come within a hairbreadth of attempted mutiny during the engagement. Keyes could have had him court-martialed. Every reg in the books screamed at him to . . . but he didn’t have it in him to send the young man before a board of inquiry. He would instead merely transfer the Lieutenant to a place where he would still do the UNSC some good—
perhaps a distant outpost.
Was all the blame his? As Commander, it was his responsibility to maintain control, to prevent a crewman from even thinking that mutiny was a possibility.
He sighed. Maybe he should have told his crew what he was attempting . . . but there had simply been no time. And certainly, no time for discussion as Jaggers would have wanted. No. The other bridge officers had concerns, but they had followed his orders, as their duty required.
As much as Commander Keyes believed in giving people a second chance, this was where he drew the line.
To make matters worse, transferring Jaggers would leave a hole in the bridge crew.
Commander Keyes accessed the service records of Iroquois ’ junior officers. There were several who might qualify for navigation officer. He flipped through their files on his data pad, and then paused.
The theoretical paper on mass-space compression was still open, as well as his hastily calculated course corrections.
He smiled and archived those notes. He might one day give a lecture on this battle at the Academy. It would be useful to have the original source material.
There was also the data from the Archimedes Sensor Outpost. That report had been thoroughly made: clean data graphs and a navigational course plotted for the object through Slipstream space—not an easy task even with an AI. The report even had tags to route it to the astrophysics section of the UNSC.
Thoughtful.
He looked up the service record of the officer who had filed the report: Ensign William Lovell.
Keyes leaned closer. The boy’s Career Service Vitae was almost twice as long as his own. He had volunteered and been accepted at Luna Academy. He transferred in his second year, having already received a commission to Ensign for heroism in a training flight that had saved the entire crew. He took duty on the first outbound corvette headed into battle. Three Bronze Stars, a Silver Cluster, and two Purple Hearts, and he had catapulted to a full Lieutenant within three years.
Then something went terribly wrong. Lovell’s decline in the UNSC had been as rapid as his ascent. Four reports of insubordination and he was busted to Second Lieutenant and transferred twice. An incident with a civilian woman—no details in the files, although Commander Keyes wondered if the girl listed in the report, Anna Gerov, was Vice Admiral Gerov’s daughter.
He had been reassigned to the Archimedes Sensor Outpost, and had been there for the last year, an unheard of length of time in such a remote facility.
Commander Keyes reviewed the logs when Lovell had been on duty. They were careful and intelligent.
So the boy was still sharp . . . was he hiding?
There was a gentle knock on his door.
“Lieutenant Dominique, I said I was not to be disturbed.”
“Sorry to intrude, son,” said a muffled voice. The pressure door’s wheel turned and Admiral Stanforth stepped inside. “But I thought I’d just stop by since I was in the neighborhood.”
Admiral Stanforth was much smaller in person than he appeared on-screen. His back was stooped over with age, and his white hair was thinning at the crown. Still, he exuded a reassuring air of authority that Keyes instantly recognized.
“Sir!” Commander Keyes stood at attention, knocking over his chair.
“At ease, son.” The Admiral looked around his quarters, and his gaze lingered a moment on the framed copy of Lagrange’s original manuscript in which he derived his equations of motion. “You can pour me a few fingers of the whiskey, if you can spare it.”