CHAPTER EIGHT: Ride Boldly

Rear Admiral Andrew Prescott had discovered that he hated survey missions. This was only the third he'd commanded, but that was enough to know that he hated survey missions.

Someone had to command them, he admitted, and the ships assigned to them these days certainly made them big enough to be a rear admiral's responsibility. And the rise to flag rank which had made him a candidate for the job, while less meteoric than his brother Raymond's explosive elevation, was both professionally satisfying and a mark of his superiors' confidence in him. For that matter, his assignment to Survey Command at this particular point in the war was an enormous compliment . . . looked at in the proper light, of course.

He sighed and tipped back in his command chair on TFNS Concorde's quiet, efficiently functioning flag bridge while he contemplated the peaceful imagery of the main plot. They were nine months out of System L-169, floating near yet another anonymous, uncharted flaw in space, and he'd spent a lot of time on Flag Bridge over that long, weary voyage. The flotilla had charted sixteen new warp points during that time, including the present object of its attention, which wouldn't have been all that many for a peacetime cruise of that length but was quite an accomplishment under wartime conditions of stealth and caution. Yet despite their achievements, the peculiar amalgam of tension, concentration, and utter boredom of their mission so far would have been impossible to beat. It was far harder than a civilian might have believed for people to remain alert and watchful-even deep in unexplored, potentially hostile space for weeks on end-when absolutely nothing happened.

Of course, boredom is a lot better than what we'd be feeling if something did happen, he reminded himself, and let his eyes linger on the icons representing his command. Every unit was cloaked, and Concorde's sensors couldn't actually have found them all, even knowing where to look, but CIC managed to keep track of all their positions anyway.

Survey Flotilla 62 boasted twenty-three ships, from Concorde and the Borsoi-B-class fleet carrier Foxhound all the way down to four Wayfarer-class freighters and the escort cruisers Dido and Yura. They were all fast ships, too, and the flotilla's nine battlecruisers and three carriers represented a powerful striking force. But they weren't supposed to do any striking. If they were forced to, then their mission would have failed in at least one respect, for all this effort and tonnage truly focused on insuring that the five Hun-class survey cruisers and their crews of highly trained specialists were allowed to do their jobs unmolested and undetected, and everyone knew it. Especially the aforementioned specialists, who somehow managed (solely out of deeply ingrained professionalism and courtesy, no doubt) not to look too obviously down their noses at the ignorant louts from Battle Fleet assigned to do unimportant things like keeping the Bugs off their backs.

Prescott's lips twitched in a faint smile. It was possible, he supposed, that he was being just a bit overly sensitive. Under more normal circumstances, he suspected he would actually have enjoyed Survey Command. Even under those which presently applied, he wasn't completely immune to the wonder and delight of going places and seeing things no human could possibly have seen ever before. Unfortunately, circumstances weren't normal. Worse, he was one of those ignorant louts the specialists deprecated (although very respectfully in his case), for he'd never served aboard a single Survey Command vessel before he was assigned to ramrod an entire flotilla.

If it hadn't been for the war-and the Bugs-he probably would have repaired that omission in his resumé by now. The Prescott family had a long, distinguished tradition of service to the Federation's navy. Indeed, there'd been Prescotts in the TFN for as long as there'd been a TFN, and before that they'd served in the pre-Navy survey ships of the Federation, and before that they'd served in wet-navy ships clear back to the days of sail and muzzle-loading cannon. In many ways, the Prescotts and the handful of families like them were anachronisms in a service whose officer corps took self-conscious pride in its tradition as a meritocracy. Ability was supposed to matter more than family connections, and by and large, it did. Yet everyone knew there were also dynasties within the Navy, families whose members were just a bit more equal than anyone else.

Andrew Prescott had always known it, at least. There were times he'd felt guilty over the inside track an accident of birth had bestowed upon him, yet in an odd way, that advantage had actually conspired to make him a better officer than he might otherwise have been. Family tradition was a powerful force, and generation after generation of Prescotts had simply taken it for granted that their sons and daughters would carry on their own tradition and excel in the process. Andrew's parents had been no exception to that rule, and there'd never been any question in anyone's mind, Raymond's and his own included, what the two of them would do with their lives. Yet the knowledge that the name he bore might give him an unfair advantage or let him get by with less than the maximum performance of which he was capable (and, worse, that some among his fellow officers would think it might, whether it did or not) had given Andrew a special incentive to prove it hadn't. He'd entered the Academy determined that no one would ever have the slightest reason to believe he hadn't earned whatever rank he might attain, and that determination had stayed with him ever since.

At the same time, he'd been aware for years that he was being groomed for eventual flag rank, and in the peacetime TFN, that had meant at least a brief stint attached to Survey Command. An admiral was supposed to have well-rounded experience in all phases of the Navy's operations, which meant that on his way to his exalted status he had to have his ticket punched in battle-line and carrier ops, survey missions, dirtside duty with BuShips and BuWeaps, War College duty, JCS staff duty, and probably some diplomatic service, as well. As both a Prescott and an officer who'd demonstrated high ability (and ambition), Andrew had been in line for the appropriate ticket punching when the Bugs appeared. He'd commanded the battlecruiser Daikyu, and he'd already known his next command would be the Borsoi-class fleet carrier Airedale, after which he'd been almost certain to move over to Survey for at least one tour with one of the smaller prewar flotillas. Not as its CO, of course. That was a job for the specialists who spent virtually their entire careers in Survey. But he would have commanded one of the survey cruisers, which would have given him some hands-on experience with the job. From there, he would probably have moved up to take over a destroyer squadron or a cruiser division and might well have finished up with a second Survey tour as a flotilla's tactical coordinator, in command of its attached escort of "gunslingers."

But all nonessential personnel reassignments, including his transfer to Airedale, had been frozen when the sudden explosion of combat rocked the Navy back on its heels. That had been fortunate in many ways, given Airedale's destruction with all hands at Third Justin, but it also meant that, as the war's enormous casualty toll shattered the Bureau of Personnel's neat, peacetime training and promotion plans, Prescott never had gotten a carrier command. On the other hand, he'd been kicked up to commodore, despite his lack of carrier experience, at least eight years sooner than could possibly have happened in time of peace, and he'd made rear admiral by forty, barely two years after that. He could wish his indecently rapid promotions owed less to the old tradition of stepping into dead men's shoes, but he was scarcely alone in that. And by prewar standards, virtually all of his new-minted flag officer colleagues and he were drastically inexperienced for their ranks. Ticket punching had been placed on indefinite hold, because the holders of those tickets had suddenly found themselves faced with doing something no Navy officer had done in sixty years: fighting an actual war.