You mean …?”
“‘It has been determined by this Board of Inquiry that Rear Admiral Alexander Koenig has consistently and honorably served in the best traditions of the service,’” she quoted. “Or legal gobbledygook to that effect. You’re free and clear.”
“And still in command of the battlegroup?”
“Abso-damn-lutely.”
Koenig felt himself begin to relax. He’d been sure the board would clear him. And yet …
“I figured you would be getting an earful from Quintanilla.”
“That’s why things ran this late,” she told him. “Did you really throw him out of CIC?”
“Yes I did. You saw the command logs, didn’t you?” Everything that happened on the bridge and the CIC was recorded, optical and audio. Normally those records were kept sealed by the AI that collected them, but they could be retrieved for boards of inquiry, promotion boards, courts martial, and other legal proceedings.
She grinned in his mind. “Yes, but it still was a little hard to believe.” Her face grew more serious. “I’m afraid you’ve made some enemies in the Senate, Alex.”
“Already had ’em. A few more won’t hurt.”
“We were right about Noranaga. He was the one dissenting vote, by the way. He’s giving a deposition to a Senate probe tomorrow.”
“What probe?”
“Command attenuation.”
“I haven’t heard about that one.”
“It’s new. There was some agitation for hearings along those lines when we got kicked out of Arcturus last year. Your … um … independence at Eta Boötis kind of brought things to a head.”
While Koenig hadn’t heard of a specific Senate probe into the topic, he knew well what command attenuation was. The basic theory was taught at the Academy and accepted as holy writ throughout the hierarchy of naval command. It stated, essentially, that the limitations imposed on communications by the speed of light severely restricted the ability of the highest command levels—the Senate in Columbus and the Supreme Military Command Staff on Mars—to manage both strategy and diplomacy through the Fleet. It took three weeks under Alcubierre Drive to reach Eta Boötis, another three weeks to return. There were special high-velocity courier ships that could make the voyage faster—a week or two, perhaps—but the fact remained that by the time the Senate had learned of a threat at Eta Boötis and dispatched a carrier battlegroup to deal with it, the 1MEF had been pinned down and was under siege. Armchair strategists on Earth or Mars had no chance of managing a battle light years distant, and word of defeats or victories by Earth forces could take weeks or months to get back home.
The Navy had accepted command attenuation as a fact of life, and trained its command officers to operate with a high degree of autonomy, making both military and political decisions that could easily have a strong effect on life and politics back in the solar system. The problem was that, by long tradition, the military was supposed to be subservient to the civilian government. If the military became too independent in its thinking and operation, civilian oversight and control would be lost. The farther away a fleet or battlegroup was operating, the less control the Senate Military Directorate had over it—command attenuation in action.
Political liaisons like John Quintanilla were the Senate’s answer to the problem, an attempt to put someone into the fleet command structure who represented the political interests of the Senate. Deployed fleet commanders like Koenig despised the idea; political liaisons by their very nature complicated already complex missions, and that could translate as higher losses, quite possibly defeat. Political liaisons rarely had the military training that let them see a developing situation through the strategic and tactical training and experience of a command officer.
“You’re telling me I haven’t heard the last of this,” Koenig said after a moment’s thought.
“Good God! Of course you haven’t! As long as we’re saddled with PLs, there’s going to be friction. The PL insisting on doing things his way so the civilians stay in charge, the CO insisting that doing it that way will lose the battle.”
“So what’s going to happen?”
“Nothing for a long time. That’s the problem with political assemblies … or maybe it’s a blessing. They take forever to decide something. And by the time they do, their decision may no longer have anything to do with the problem.” She hesitated. “Quintanilla mentioned something in passing this afternoon. He said your deep-strike plan is being reviewed again. He’s against it, of course … but he mentioned that if the Senate approved it, it was tantamount to cutting you off from any Senate oversight whatsoever.”
“Operation Crown Arrow? It’s back on the table?”
“Exactly.”
Operation Crown Arrow had been conceived a year ago, shortly after the twin defeats at Arcturus Station and at Yong Yuan Dan, the Battle of Everdawn. The WHISPERS deep space listening posts on Pluto, Eris, Orca, and distant Sedna had tentatively identified a major Turusch base or supply depot at Alphekka, seventy-two light years from Earth, forty-two light years from Arcturus, forty-four from Eta Boötis.
Intelligence believed Alphekka—Alpha Corona Borealis—might be the Sh’daar/Turusch staging area for operations into human space. Humans had not been out that far, but it was thought that the Turusch homeworlds lay somewhere in that direction. Operation Crown Arrow—Crown was a reference to the constellation Corona Borealis, the “Northern Crown,” lying just to the east of Boötis in Earth’s night sky—had been a proposed long-range carrier strike against the presumed base.
The original idea for Crown Arrow had been Koenig’s, first described in a proposal submitted to the Senate Military Directorate eight months ago. The America carrier battlegroup would have been the heart of the strike force, which Koenig thought should number at least three carriers and one hundred supporting vessels.
The Directorate, perhaps predictably, had balked. One hundred ships represented about 20 percent of the total Confederation naval force; half of those ships would be logistical and supply vessels, and sending them out beyond the edge of Humankind space would put a serious strain on the Navy’s ability to keep the stay-at-home fleet elements and some hundreds of outposts and colonies supplied.
“So why are they reconsidering Crown Arrow now?” Koenig asked.
Mendelson shrugged. “Possibly because it makes sense. Even if Alphekka isn’t an invasion staging point, WHISPERS has picked up enough traffic out in that region to suggest something is going on. Our most serious weakness right now is that we don’t know our enemy. We know nothing about them, their homeworlds, the extent of their empires, or even what they want.”
“We know what they want. We become a part of the empire of the ‘Galactic Masters.’ Humankind va Sh’daar. And we give up our right to continue making our own technological advances. They were pretty clear about that much, at least.”
“A long-range strike like the one you propose might let us learn a lot more about their technological level, their deployment, their political structure, their plans. We’re fighting them blindfolded if we don’t. Anyway … there’s a faction within the Directorate
