“Did you know that the Mogats routed one of the fleets in the Perseus Arm?” Brocius asked. This was the first time he’d spoken since we sat at the table. It was one hell of a conversation starter, especially as I had been laboring under the impression that the Mogat ships could not stand up to the modern U.A. Navy.
“One of our fleets?” I echoed, lamely.
“Fortunately for us, they only sent a few ships. Our ships didn’t put up much of a fight.
“Some Outer Perseus ships overtook five Mogat ships as they broadcasted in an area they were patrolling. That’s it, just five ships. Good thing. If there had been more of them, we might have lost the whole damned fleet.
“The Outer Perseus Fleet is Adam Porter’s outfit, mind you. Porter served on one of my ships a couple of years before he got his star. He’s no atom-splitter, that one. He never had much of a mind for strategy.”
“You called it a rout. How bad was it?” I asked.
Our waiter returned with eggs Benedict, hash browns, toast, and wedges of cantaloupe. He placed the plates with the eggs Benedict in front of us, then placed the rest of the food in the center. He poured us coffee and orange juice. I half expected him to put down his tray and start reciting poetry, he was taking so long. I wanted to know what happened, and Brocius did not seem willing to speak with anyone else in the room.
Finally, the petty officer left the room.
“Porter went after them with a fighter carrier, five battleships, ten frigates…”
“Beat by five Mogat ships?” I asked. That sounded bad.
“Porter’s fleet has the oldest ships in the galaxy,” Brocius said. I briefly considered reminding Brocius that the ships in the Mogat fleet were older than our oldest active ships but decided against it.
“We’re talking about the Perseus Arm, Harris. Nothing much happens out there. Before the war broke out, Congress wanted to shut the Outer Perseus Fleet down.”
“What kind of ships did the Mogats bring to the fight?” I asked.
“Five battleships,” Brocius said. “We’ve built our strategy around the idea that ship-per-ship we can beat the Mogats any time. Now we have to rethink that. By the time they were done, Porter lost a fighter carrier and three battleships. The Mogats didn’t even bother with his frigates.”
“What did they lose?” I asked.
“We don’t know how much damage Porter did to the ships that got away, but he only sank one of their battleships.” Brocius took a long drink of coffee, but his eyes remained fixed on me.
I cut a triangle from my eggs Benedict. This was not the kind of breakfast I normally ate. I preferred my eggs scrambled and my bacon straight instead of with hollandaise sauce. The muffin on the bottom of this stack was still crunchy. This was too rich a breakfast for my taste, but I did not say so. I cut more, watched the yolk spill out across my plate, then took another bite of the slimy thing.
“Like it?” Brocius asked.
“It’s good,” I chose to be politic. “Earth-grown?”
“That’s all you can get with the Broadcast Network down,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much it would cost to ship in eggs and bread from the territories?”
I should have figured that.
“Porter is still in command of the fleet for now, but his career is specked. There’s no room in the U.A. Navy for officers who let their fleet get chased by five ships,” Brocius said.
“So the Mogats sank a few of his ships…then what? They wouldn’t just let him leave,” I said.
“That is precisely what they did,” Brocius said. More than anything else, he sounded disgusted.
“Why the speck would they do that?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Having defeated an enemy with superior numbers, why let him flee and regroup? I thought about this for a few seconds. “Have there been any other engagements?”
“No,” Brocius said.
“Before they merged with the Confederate Arms and Halverson took over, the Mogats never seemed very bright,” I said.
“Did you know Halverson’s been promoted to fleet admiral? Our fleet admiral?” Brocius asked, obvious distaste dripping from his voice.
Admiral Tom Halverson, who led the attack on the Earth Fleet, joined the Confederate Arms while they were allied with the Atkins Believers. He left the Unified Authority as a rear admiral, received a few additional stars, and emerged as the head of the combined Mogat-Confederate Arms Navy. The notion that Halverson could return and take command of our fleet clawed at my stomach.
Brocius went after his eggs Benedict in a methodical fashion, cutting the open-faced sandwich into six bites, then downing three of those bites in a minute-long feast. He chewed each piece mechanically, washed it down with a sip of orange juice, and then speared the next bite with his fork.
“I’ll ask it again, Harris, what do we need? How do we stack the deck? What do we need to do to give ourselves house odds?”
“They’re hard to read,” I said. “I always knew that the Mogats were not military-minded, but allowing a fleet to escape is strange, even by their standards.”
I thought about what I’d said and changed my mind. “They almost act surprised when they win. I mean, when they beat the Earth Fleet and shut down the Network, the planet was theirs. They should have landed troops and taken DC.
“Now you tell me that they had a fleet at their mercy and let it escape. It’s almost like they want to convert us, not beat us.”
“Did you hear that they tried to land a messiah in Israel?” Brocius asked.
“Yes, I heard about the Space Bibles, too.”
“I agree with you, it does sound like they’re out to convert us,” Brocius said.
“We need one of their ships with its navigational computer in one piece. That is how we can find them,” I said.
“We can send a salvage team to the battleship Porter sank,” Brocius suggested.
“No, we need a boat in working condition.”
Brocius began his eggs Benedict–eating ritual again. He cut a sandwich into six pieces and speared the first piece. “Capture a battleship? That would be a trick.”
“We have people who could do it,” I said. “Can you get me to the outer Scutum-Crux Fleet?” I asked.
“Why Scuttum-Crux?” Brocius asked.
“Because the Kamehameha is in that fleet,” I answered.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the entire Unified Authority Navy, there was only one Expansion-class fighter carrier active in any of its fleets—the Kamehameha. All of the other carriers were of the more modern Perseus-class variety. They were five thousand one hundred feet wide and carried eleven thousand troops—fourteen battalions of Marines just spoiling for a fight. The Kamehameha measured half that size and carried a mere one thousand combat men, but they were special. They were Navy SEALs; and more than that, they were Adam Boyd clones. The Kamehameha might have been undersized and obsolete, but with that complement of Boyd clones, it could win a war.
Larger than any battleship and smaller than other fighter carriers, the Kamehameha traveled with the rest of the Scutum-Crux Fleet as well hidden as a shark among dolphins. From the cabin of the self-broadcasting explorer ship, I watched the whole fleet and remembered my days as a Marine. I spent almost two years on the Kamehameha, back when it carried Marines. I reported in as a corporal and transferred out as a lieutenant.
On the charts and simulations, you always see ships laid out in a flat formation—even when the charts are three-dimensional. Coming in this time, I was struck by the way the fleet had grouped. The fighter carriers were in the center of a three-dimensional diamond with layers of destroyers and battleships surrounding them from above, from below, and from every side. A trio of battleships led the formation.