“And these will be ready for normal duty in a few days?” Richards asked.
“Well…” Bondarevsky cleared his throat. “Most of the pilots have had at least some sim time. The Strakhas performed well enough. I’ll be happier after everybody’s had a chance to get the feel of their birds, but with an intense cycle of flight ops we ought to get everybody up to snuff fairly soon.”
Graham shifted. “You said you’ll need some men and resources for all this. Just how much do you absolutely have to have? Because I wasn’t kidding about needing crash priority to get the drives back in operation.”
“I’m sure we can work out a compromise, Commander,” Bondarevsky said wearily. “But much as we need to get the engines working and get this tub into a safer orbit clear of the brown dwarf’s radiation, we also need to be able to rely on both flight decks to get our fighters into play faster. That was the big bottleneck this afternoon. Half the Strakha squadron didn’t even clear the flight deck before the bandits were running. We’ve got to have a faster response time. Next time around it might not be a bunch of pirates in a half-improvised carrier coming at us. If the Cats found out we were here and sent in a supercarrier of their own, we’d be dead meat.”
“The two of you can hash out a work schedule tomorrow morning before our regular meeting,” Richards suggested. “Captain Lake, maybe you could be there too?”
The commander of the factory ship inclined his head.
Richards looked around the chamber. “If that’s all, I think we should probably call it a day…”
Tolwyn met his eyes. “The memorial service,” he said quietly.
The battle group commander nodded. “Right. We’ll be holding a service for the Sindri’s crew at twenty-one hundred hours tonight on the flight deck. I’d appreciate it if all department heads were there, and anyone else who cares to come. I know those of you from other ships will want to hold your own observances, but representatives would be welcome. This has been a blow to morale, despite the fact that we beat the attackers off, and I think it would be a good idea for the whole battle group to demonstrate out solidarity and determination before we get on with the next stage of the project. Agreed?”
There was a murmur of approval from the assembled officers. Richards stood slowly, looking his full age and more today, and turned to leave. Tolwyn watched him thoughtfully. He was beginning to wonder if Vance Richards was really up to the strains of leading a battle group after so many years behind a desk.
Flight Deck, FRLS Karga
Orbiting Vaku System, Vaku System
2112 hours (CST)
Bondarevsky tried not to sway from sheer fatigue as he stood in ranks together with the other senior officers and listened to Karga’s ranking chaplain, Commander Francis Darby, somberly reciting the words of the memorial service to the assembled crew on the flight deck and all around the carrier over the internal video channels. It was principally for the thirty-two crew members aboard the Sindri when she was destroyed, but Bondarevsky, at least, considered it a send-off for Lieutenant Jensson as well. And tired as he was, he wanted to honor the memories of the dead the best way he knew how.
How many times had he done this over the years? He’d watched more good men and women the than he could ever hope to remember, and it never got any easier. Tomorrow he would have to write the letter to Jensson’s widowed mother back home on Terra. He’d barely known her son, transferred to the supercarrier less than two weeks before his death. What could he say to comfort her?
He remembered how he’d felt the day Svetlana died. There was precious little comfort to be given when a loved one was killed in action.
Darby finished speaking and nodded to Harper, who stood poised by an intercom station. The young Taran touched a button and the recorded sound of a great bell tolled out. The gathered officers and enlisted personnel on the cavernous flight deck stood in respectful silence as the bell rang thirty-two times, slowly, mournfully. One stroke for each man and woman aboard FRLS Sindri.
When the bell had faded, Harper hit another control, and called up a recording of “Amazing Grace” played on bagpipes. Sparks operated another set of controls to wheel out an empty coffin bearing the name of Eric Jensson. It rolled to the edge of the force field at the stern end of the flight deck, paused for a moment, then lifted on thrusters to drift through the opening and out into the void. A team of Bhaktadils marines raised their laser rifles to their shoulders to fire a last salute.
Bondarevsky was a little bit surprised to find his lips moving in a silent prayer for the dead man, the first battle casualty of the Black Cats.
The coffin drifted from view, the marines shouldered their arms, and “Amazing Grace” faded away. Geoff Tolwyn stepped forward to replace Darby and stood for a long moment in silence, surveying the audience.
“The loss of a ship in combat is always a tragedy for the people left behind,” he began at last. “Especially when the ship was never intended to fight in the first place. Those of us who are trained to warfare regard it as our job to protect the noncombatants from harm, and failure weighs heavy on us all when we find that all of our efforts, however heroic or determined they may have been, have turned out to be to no avail.
“Sindri was destroyed today because an enemy saw it as a way to get at us. They believed that it was the tender’s shields that were keeping us alive, and they targeted her with the deliberate intention of rendering us helpless. Every analysis of the battle that we’ve run only reinforces that statement. We were lucky enough to have our own shields up, thanks to Commander Graham and his engineering staff, but the attempt could easily have been successful. In a sense, then, the crew of Sindri died protecting us. Though she was not a fighting ship, her crew was as much a part of the Free Republic Navy as any of us, and they gave their lives doing their duty. For that reason, I say, we should not feel guilty at our failure so much as we should feel pride and respect for them.“
Tolwyn paused a moment. “For some time now I’ve been under pressure to give a new name to this ship. Calling it for a Kilrathi hero is not exactly appropriate to our plans for her, after all. There have been plenty of suggestions, some laudable, not a few disparaging or downright obscene.” That stirred a ripple of laughter in the audience, despite the solemnity of the occasion. “President Kruger wants us to bear the name Alamo, after the heroic struggle for freedom by a dedicated band of patriots. I’ve resisted him on a point of principle. I don’t like my ship being named after a bloody massacre where the defenders lost the fight!”
A few of the crew on the flight deck laughed. Tolwyn raised a hand and went on. “Today, though, I’ve settled on a name I intend to put forward to the Navy as soon as possible, if all of you approve. It’s not normally my habit to run a democracy on my ships, as anyone who knows me will tell you, but in this case I want you all to feel that this ship stands for something.” He smiled. “Some of you might not be familiar with the background from which I’ve taken this name, so bear with me while I explain it to you. In the mythology of the Scandinavian countries back on Terra, dating back to a time before Christianity, it is told that the gods once asked a master smith of the dark elves to make them a collection of wondrous gifts. There was a magic ring that produced copies of itself, a boat that could be folded up into a pocket, a wig of spun gold to replace the golden hair stolen from one of the goddesses by the trickster Loki, and so on. Now Loki became jealous of the craftsman’s work, and set out to ruin it. He changed himself into a stinging insect and did his best to keep the dark elf from his work. But he was only partially successful in this. Only one gift was marred, the war hammer intended for the weather god Thor. The handle ended up too short, but the weapon itself was still a powerful one that the Thunder-God used time and again to smite his powerful enemies.”