“I agree. It will be three more years, at least, before the CAC gets back on its feet, and longer for the Caliphate.” Stark reached for the flask of Scotch as he spoke, but changed his mind and poured himself some water instead. “And Europa Federalis and the CEL just declared a truce. They fought each other to exhaustion, and both are going to have to rebuild.” He leaned back and sighed heavily. “It is now or never.”
Dutton nodded his reluctant agreement. “I wonder how many secret discussions like this are going on right now out there somewhere?” His voice was thoughtful and a little sad. “How many plans are being made even as we make our own?”
Both men considered the question, but neither offered an answer.
Chapter 4
Augustus Garret hated his job. He was one of the great heroes of the war, famous everywhere, the most decorated naval officer in the history of the Alliance. He’d been thought dead, the victim of an extraordinary assassination attempt, but not only had he survived, he’d returned to take command of the fleet in the final battle, winning a crushing victory that, for all intents and purposes, ended the war.
After the treaty was signed he’d wanted nothing so much as to remain at his post as the senior combat officer in the navy. But his renown brought other offers, obligations really, and eventually he’d bowed to the inevitable and accepted the post of Director of the Navy. It was an administrative desk job, something he loathed and, perhaps worse, it was located in Washbalt. Garret was a creature of space, more at home in the control center of a warship than the surface of a planet, and least of all a city infested with bureaucrats and pompous functionaries. But he’d been guilted into accepting the post to safeguard the navy he loved so much. There would be serious changes coming with the peace, and the looming question of how to deal with the spread of colonial separatism was overshadowing everything. Garret wasn’t sure how he thought colonial unrest should be handled, but he was determined the navy would never become an instrument to terrorize rebellious colonists or bombard civilian populations. There was no surer way to see to that than to accept the supreme command himself so, reluctantly, he did just that.
It was obligation and the heavy weight of responsibility that brought Garret to Washbalt, not any desire to chain himself to a desk and spend all day writing regulations and reviewing budgets – no matter what they paid him or how much braid they added to his already overly decorated uniform.
When he first got to Washbalt, he dove right into the work at hand, approaching tasks the way he did in battle. But the wheels of government are a different thing entirely, and he continually found himself furious at the time it took to get anything done. Still, his almost inexhaustible energy enabled him to accomplish more than the last five of his predecessors combined. It also created friction with others high in the government who viewed him as an upstart and an outsider and resented his relentlessly pressuring them.
The president himself had waived the requirement that the Naval Director be a Political Academy graduate, an almost unprecedented act. The Academies were the primary tool the elite used to restrict power to themselves and their cronies in a nation that called itself a democratic republic, even though it was anything but. Nevertheless, despite his war record and the Presidential exemption, the entrenched politicals considered him beneath them, and they resisted him at every opportunity.
Despite his political inexperience and the friction he encountered, he was proud of what he’d achieved. The navy was returning to a peacetime footing, mothballing many of its vessels and demobilizing thousands of personnel. Garret made sure they all received their pensions and colonial land grants, putting his influence and prestige on the line to prevent the government from reneging on its obligations as it had so often in the past. His veterans, at least, would get what they had been promised.
He had prepared his own plans for the reduction of fleet strength, mostly placing older ships into reserve status, but they’d been overruled, by whom he didn’t know. Instead he was forced to take five of the new Yorktown class ships out of service. The navy had ten of them, and they were the newest and most powerful capital ships in space, slated to replace the older models still in service. But now he was losing half of them, and the reasoning he was given – to insure that the reserve had modern ships in case the frontline forces took catastrophic losses in a future war – was idiotic. Worse, the ships were going to a new strategic reserve, one that was not under his direct authority. He argued vehemently, but he lost that battle…and the ships.
He also oversaw a blizzard of promotions and reassignments, starting with Jennifer Simon, his old communications officer. She’d wanted to come with him as an aide, but he knew an earthbound desk job would be toxic to a good combat officer’s career. She was smart and reliable, and he was sure she’d make a great senior officer one day. He pushed through her early promotion to lieutenant commander and assigned her as the first officer on one of the new Halberd-class light cruisers. It was a posting four or five years ahead of the normal career path, but then he’d been years ahead of his own too, and that had worked out pretty well.
He ran into interference regarding personnel assignments too and, though he usually got his way, he was forced to accept a few he didn’t like. Those postings felt like patronage and cronyism, and it annoyed him to move political favorites over men and women who’d earned their place through hard service. He fought on every one of them he didn’t like. Sometimes he won; sometimes he lost.
Garret was a brilliant man, bordering on obsessive, relaxing little and giving his all to the job. He focused on his work, whatever that was, with an almost unimaginable intensity. He had no real interests outside the service save one - he did have a bit of a weakness for women. As a young officer he’d had quite a reputation for running wild on every port where he’d taken leave. But that was a long time ago, and with his ascension to command rank he’d left his old ways behind. Regulations specifically prohibited relationships between personnel serving on the same ship or post, though this was one of the service’s most ignored dictates. It really wasn’t a big deal if two lieutenants had a fling, but at higher altitude things changed dramatically. It wouldn’t do for the admiral to be sleeping around with his junior officers. Duty always came first for Augustus Garret, and it always would.
But now he was in the middle of the biggest city in the Alliance, surrounded by the almost endless parade of beautiful women inhabiting Washbalt’s corridors of power. He was bored, and it was almost too easy for a war hero who commanded a position of such power and prestige. Soon it was well known that the Naval Director was drawn to a pretty face, and his leisure hours became busy.
But the women were just diversions, a way to take his mind off of the constant longing to return to space. It had been a lifetime since there’d been anyone who’d truly meant anything to him, and there had only ever been one. He could still picture her face the day he’d left her behind and boarded that shuttle. He’d chosen the service and the pursuit of glory over her, and he’d broken her heart in the process. His choice had been a fateful one, and his career a success beyond anything he could have imagined at the time. But he still thought about that day, that choice, what might have been. She was long dead now, killed during the Second Frontier War, when he’d been too late to save her. But he could still see her standing there, trying to hold back her tears while he boarded the shuttle.