Larkin looked straight ahead at the bulkhead, but she nodded. “I understand.”
Sikander folded his arms deliberately and leaned against the corner of the desk. “I do not want to have this conversation again, and I suspect you do not either,” he said. “So, Ms. Larkin, let’s go ahead and get to the bottom of this: What exactly is the nature of your problem with me?”
He waited for a response. Finally, Larkin steeled herself and spoke. “I doubt that you are qualified for the rank and position you hold, sir,” she said.
Sikander stopped himself before he said something he would regret, and forced himself to answer evenly. “Well, that’s straightforward enough,” he said. He’d encountered that sort of distrust before, although few people had the nerve to express it in so many words to a superior officer. Then again, Angela Larkin had made it plain that if she had something on her mind, she wasn’t inclined to hide what she thought. “Ms. Larkin, have I given you reason to form that opinion in the time that I have been on Hector? Other than the torpedo business, on which we obviously disagree?” he asked.
She hesitated before answering. “No, sir.”
“Then reconsider your position, or request a transfer. Or, if I prove as unqualified as you fear, simply wait me out. You’ll soon have the opportunity to see if my replacement is any better. But whichever option you choose, do not dismiss my concerns or challenge my orders in front of other officers or crewmen again.”
Larkin gave a grudging nod. “Yes, sir.”
“Very well. I consider the matter closed. Provide Mr. Girard with whatever assistance he requires, and continue with your duties. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Larkin saluted, performed a crisp about-face, and marched out of the office.
Sikander watched her leave, wondering if he had handled the matter properly. Perhaps Larkin would give him a chance and perhaps she wouldn’t, but at the very least he thought that she would be more careful about maintaining a semblance of professional courtesy in front of others. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. For now, that was all the victory he needed.
* * *
On the last day of the warp transit, Sikander took his station on the bridge an hour before Hector’s scheduled arrival in Gadira. The main bridge display featured a prominent countdown to warp termination. During the last few minutes of a warp transit, ships traditionally adopted a posture of maximum damage readiness. The odds that a vessel might end its warp and find itself in danger of collision were literally astronomical, but ships returned to normal space with the same velocity they had when they initiated their warp transit. CSS Hector had accelerated up to ten percent of light speed in the outskirts of the Caledonia system, so that would be her speed when she arrived. A ship that made even a tiny navigational error could return to normal space and discover that it was headed into a dangerous situation at thirty thousand kilometers per second; simple prudence dictated that the ship should be ready for trouble.
As the counter approached 0:00:00, Captain Markham keyed the ship’s announcing system. “All hands, this is the captain. Arrival imminent; take your stations.”
Sikander watched the last few seconds tick down—and then Hector dropped her warp bubble, right on time. If his eyes had been closed, he never would have noticed. Bubbling and unbubbling offered no physiological cues to humans on board, since after all a vessel remained in perfectly normal space within the confines of its warp field, and warp generators in operation were not any louder than the ship’s normal machinery noises. All that happened was that the displays on the bridge gave a sudden lurch and recalibrated as the computers switched from providing estimated positions to accepting actual sensor input. The main vid display that curved around the front of the bridge compartment switched to an enhanced local view, marking the location and distance to the central star and each of the system’s planets, and quickly populating the screen with the tracks and identifications of dozens of commercial and industrial vessels under way in the area.
“Clear arrival,” Sublieutenant Keane reported from the sensor console. “Nothing within ten million kilometers, ma’am.” Given the potential dangers of arrival in the relatively cluttered inner reaches of a planetary system, captains preferred to cut their warp generators in the outlying regions of a system, even if that meant a long trudge in normal space to finish their journey.
“Very well,” Captain Markham answered. “Depower and retract the ring. Navigation, what’s our position?” Back around the cruiser’s slim waist, the large motors controlling the fairings that deployed the warp ring hummed, producing a slight tremor in the deck under Sikander’s feet. A moment later, the ring sections retracted into their sockets with a series of audible thumps.
“Gadira II is eleven light-minutes distant, bearing three-one-zero down thirty, ma’am,” Commander Chatburn said. “We’re about ten million kilometers off our estimated position; looks like a minor deviation in our transit alignment.”
Captain Markham nodded. “Not bad for a long transit. Helm, set course for the planet, standard acceleration. Communications, please transmit our arrival notification to the local traffic-control authority.”
Sikander tapped at his console. That meant … a six-hour passage from their emergence point to the system’s inhabited planet. It was in fact quite good navigation; once during his tour on Adept, they’d arrived almost fifty light-minutes from their destination after a particularly long transit.
The bridge display slowly swung to the left and down as Chief Quartermaster Holtz at the helm adjusted the ship’s attitude to bring her nose to the proper intercept course. Then he activated the main drive plates; a soft shudder shook the hull. Hector now traveled almost backward at thirty thousand kilometers per second, her bow pointed about three-quarters of the way around from her actual course, but it would take hours of steady thrust to kill off the speed they’d built up back in Caledonia.
Captain Markham studied the ship’s course for a moment, and nodded in satisfaction. “Very good. Secure from transit-arrival stations; Mr. Randall, I believe you have the watch.”
“I have the watch, Captain,” Randall confirmed. His left arm was still in a light sling, but he’d made a point of reporting to his station for the ship’s arrival in Gadira.
Sikander powered down his weapons console, getting ready to leave the bridge. But before he finished, Sublieutenant Keane spoke up from his post. “Sir, there’s an unidentified warship in high orbit around Gadira II,” he reported. “Mass fifty-five thousand tons … looks like a cruiser.”
“Montréalais?” Randall guessed.
“No, sir. One moment, we’ve got its transponder. It’s Dremish, sir, hull number seventy-three, SMS Panther.”
“What in the world is a Dremish warship doing here?” Markham said aloud. She had paused by the hatch when the sensor officer announced the contact. She glanced at Randall. “I saw nothing about a Dremish deployment in the threat assessments.”
“Nor did I, ma’am,” Randall answered. “This is a new development. They must have shown up while we were in transit.”
“So are they just passing through, or are they here to lean on the locals?” Chatburn asked.
“I have no idea, XO,” Markham replied. “Communications, send this on over to our Dremish friends: To commanding officer SMS Panther, my compliments. This is Captain Elise Markham, commanding officer of the Commonwealth starship Hector. We are approaching Gadira II and intend to assume an orbit at three thousand kilometers, over.”