1630 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673; TRFS Glasgow, Anna’s quarters

Anna was officially off duty, as her watch was the morning watch on the Glasgow, and like most of Terrace’s navy, that ran from 0700 hours till 1500 hours. She was like many other junior officers who were put in charge of departments; she showed up at her station at different times of the day. The excuse she used was that she was just checking up on things. The real reason was that she was still learning how to delegate properly and how to trust her subordinates. This was always one of the hardest things a junior officer had to learn, and it was something they all had to learn before they were promoted; otherwise, they would not be able to handle all their own tasks and the multiple tasks delegated to their subordinates.

She had been on the bridge a few days previous when Phillip’s boat had made the transition to Sigma Delta Four, though technically she should have let Frank Michel handle the signals with TBC-473. Instead, she handled the final signals to it. She also handled the signals with the other six boats that left the Clearwater system.

Phillip’s boat should have reported in by now. It had been in SD-Four for a day, and the message beacon should have returned just over an hour ago. Anna did not want to be standing over Lieutenant White, fretting and waiting for the message beacon from Phillip’s boat. She had enough experience to know that appearance was one of the largest portions of being a commanding officer, and appearing upset in front of her subordinates was a good way to affect morale. That was something she did not want to do, and she certainly did not want it to appear on her yearly performance review.

Her relationship with Phillip Murphy was not widely known, and that was the way she liked it. She suspected the admiral knew about it, but the admiral always played her cards close to her chest. She thought that Commodore Brown, Phillip’s last commanding officer, knew about it. Brown was like a mentor to Phillip, and they had talked about a lot of things, Brown acting almost like a second father to the young officer. Anna did not think many other people knew besides immediate families. She kept to her quarters to keep from having to answer any questions about why she was so worried about a group of torpedo boats out on patrol.

The message beacons had arrived from the other three systems. All of them were clean, and the reports from the torpedo boats showed very precise patrols and surveys of the systems. Nothing out of the ordinary had been discovered or reported yet. The message beacons had arrived within fifteen minutes of the schedule.

Anna paced in her cabin for a few more moments, constantly checking the console for any indication that a message from TBC-473 had arrived, and yet still no message had arrived. She realized she was working herself up again and sat down on the deck to meditate. Her initial training for the operations branch had given her some tools she could use to calm herself. Tools that were long unused and mostly forgotten came back to her like rusty and unused hinges. She was eventually able to get some peace of mind.

The storage crystal she and Beth had picked up still had not been fully decoded. It would serve as a good distraction for her. She had not heard anything from Beth since she had left the station, but she had not expected to, unless something went horribly wrong.

The lack of information was the most upsetting part of the situation to Anna. She was a signals officer and a member of the SSB. She was normally surrounded by too much information, more information than she or anyone could reasonably process. She was trained not to care about the information. She was trained to get the data decoded and passed on to those who could deal with it. Now she had to care about the information. She loved Phillip, and she was directly involved in the action on Clearwater Prime.

She forced her thoughts back to the storage crystal; she had to decode it just to get her mind off things. She just could not concentrate on the coding; she could not get her mind off the seemingly random stream of hexadecimal characters. Her mind slowly followed the characters, and she repeated the mantra she had been taught: two characters made a byte, four bytes made a symbol, at least five symbols to a word, and so forth as she looked over the data.

Her mind wandered as she tried to focus on the numbers and letters before her. Her thoughts went back to Phillip and his torpedo boat, and of the shooting on Clearwater Prime. She was starting to think of both things almost at the same time. But this time her mind was at peace as she did so, and her subconscious worked on the data as she assisted the computer. The computer was good at the brute force approach to decoding the text of a message, but it had terrible intuition. Intuition was where computer operators like Anna excelled. They understood the computer, and they understood the code. While they were not as fast as the computer in data processing, they gave it something that the designers had not been able to program yet.

An hour passed, and then a second as she worked on the code; then she finally got a break in it. The solution was simple, but it usually was when breaking codes like this. It was just that there were literally millions of different ways to protect the text of a message, so it took a while to figure out the one way that could be used to get the clear text of the message.

* * *

1705 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673: flag bridge of TRFS Glasgow

“He’s unreliable,” Junior Commander Robertson repeated from his link on the TRS John Charlie. “He hasn’t had enough experience with a torpedo boat to know the procedures.”

“You keep repeating that, Commander. What’s your basis that he’s unreliable? I viewed the raw data on the exercise your squadron recently conducted. Lieutenant Murphy was able to get farther than any boat has in the past despite how much you stacked the odds against him.” Commodore Brown spoke up for the first time during the briefing from the flagship of the gunship squadron.

“He only got as far as he did because he went against the rules for the exercise, Commodore. It wasn’t a realistic exercise for the squadron. If the squadron had been in their patrol boxes when the missions started, then it would have been realistic, and TBC-473 wouldn’t have gotten past the first box.”

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“That’s only because you would have tracked him the entire way from the station to the starting gate, Commander. That is an even worse reflection of reality than what happened. There is no way you are going to be able to track an enemy for so long before he arrives. Murphy beat you, and he beat you using tactics you should have been able to deal with as the squadron commander. You’re just throwing up a smoke screen to cover for it.” The commodore’s words were right on the edge of being out of line, especially in a staff meeting like this.

Admiral Hirlay let the argument between the two continue, though. Robertson was being stubborn and obstinate, but Brown was not much better. She was surprised Brown had not pulled rank yet on the junior commander. Technically, Lieutenant Murphy was under Robertson’s command now and not part of Brown’s staff, but he had been part of the commodore’s staff on the dreadnought for years as the junior tactical officer. She knew Robertson was unmotivated; she had hoped that the exercise in which the rookie boat commander had beaten him would have given him some motivation and made him less of an embarrassment.

Hirlay’s command style was usually to let the section commanders under her argue among themselves. To her mind this kept them from arguing with her, and when they had argued themselves into exhaustion, then she would be able to set down her decisions without comment as a sort of consensus. It also kept them from arguing with her when she had to give orders they did not like. It may not have been the best style, but it was her style, and it had worked back at the admiralty on Terrace, where she headed the procurement department.

Robertson did have a few points, but not as many as he thought he had. Everyone knew he had been rigging the exercises since he took command of the squadron, but until now no one had called him on it because no one cared what happened in the squadron. Even Commodore Brown did not care until Robertson had started to ruin his protégé’s reputation. Brown believed in the outmoded concept of bidirectional loyalty. Hirlay knew it was not needed in today’s navy and wished Brown understood that. Brown should have let Robertson deal with his own command as he saw fit and kept his nose with his dreadnought squadron. Lieutenant Murphy was no longer under his command and should not concern him anymore.

She thought about the situation and made a note in her personal log to have Brown transferred out as soon as she could reasonably manage it. If he could not keep his nose out of other people’s business, then he should be moved out of her Clearwater fleet and off to somewhere else where he could not bother her.

Brown was the highest-ranking subordinate in the fleet and was second-in-command. Robertson was the commander of a squadron of disposable boats, but he had better political backing than Brown had, so the junior commander from Olivier was more valuable to her career than the long-in-service and decorated commodore. All the commodore had was experience captaining a dreadnought during some of the heaviest and hardest fighting during the war a decade ago.

To Hirlay’s mind it was only the action in the war with NTF that kept him in the navy and had given him such a high post, which he was completely unsuited for. The sooner the frontline veterans from the war were gone, the better it would be for her and those who made up the true backbone of the navy. The old warhorses were still making life hard for those with the political and administrative talent to steer the navy where it needed to be.

She still had to deal with the current problem. Six of the boats had reported back without issue; one boat had not yet reported. She probably should have looked at the tasking orders and rearranged things so that the rookie commanding officer went out with a second boat, and one of the more experienced commanders went solo to Sigma Delta Four, instead of just assigning them based on their number in the squadron.

She could have also kept Murphy on base, but that would have looked bad, as she did not have an excuse. She really should have checked who was going out and made the connection between the Lieutenant Murphy she had removed from Brown’s staff and had assigned to the dead-end boats before she sent that same Murphy out alone.

The discussion continued with Robertson being more vehement with his denouements of Murphy and Brown getting his hackles up. She was surprised that Robertson was getting close to pinning all the problems in his squadron onto the new commanding officer. She should step in soon to moderate the discussion before Robertson said something that would destroy his career and cause some fallout with her own. The rest of the section leaders might start to take sides in the discussion if she did not take action soon, and she did not want anyone to come down on Brown’s side.

“Gentlemen.” She interrupted the conversation. “We aren’t getting anywhere in this discussion. We need to find out what is happening in Sigma Delta Four. And we need to know soon if there are any pirates there.” Brown fell silent, but Robertson still tried to make his point before he realized who was talking.

“Thank you,” she continued mildly. Why don’t you know when to shut up? “We need to send another patrol to that system, but we also need to move the fleet to where we can respond in case there are pirates there.

“It’s obvious that TBC-four-seventy-three was either damaged or destroyed during the transition or something else happened to it in SD-Four. Commander Robertson, I want you to lead the second patrol to SD-Four. How many boats do you think you need?” Maybe if she separated the two by a few light years, the argument would settle down. She could not banish Brown with his dreadnoughts without him taking a screening element with him, but she could send Robertson off on his own.

“If I split up the remaining boats in my squadron into two boat patrols, I can have four patrols in that system and survey it in record time.”

Brown’s face took on the expression of him biting his tongue. With the torpedo boat squadron down by two off its maximum, and seven already out on patrol, Robertson wanted to take all but one of his boats with him.

“That’s a lot of resources, Commander,” Hirlay replied as she ran the numbers through her head, thinking of the allocation of resources. Surveying the other systems had already taken too much of her fleet’s budget. Sending eight more boats to SD-Four would trim even more off her budget, and she did not want to call in any more of her markers from the procurement officer to fill out her budget shortfall.

“Admiral, if you like, I could do it with a standard patrol of two boats, but it won’t be fast,” Robertson replied. “After all, we’d have to look over the system in more detail to see if we could find the missing boat. We could report back in a day as usual, but it’ll take us more than a week to survey the system properly.”

“Very well, launch in four hours. But send back at least one message beacon after twelve hours and one per day after that. We’ll move the rest of the fleet to the egress point to SD-Four. If you discover any pirates, fire off a message beacon right away, and we’ll take the fleet through.

“I doubt you will find any,” the admiral continued. “There’s been the occasional freighter coming in and out of SD-Four since we’ve been here. They haven’t reported any pirate activity in the system. And they haven’t reported that there’s a Republic torpedo boat moving around.”

She did not want to take the fleet through, but if there were pirates there, it would be worse if she did nothing. She did not want to be seen ceding Terrace-claimed territory to a bunch of pirates. That would be worse to her career than overrunning her budget.