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He was alive, he knew, only because the savagely wounded heavy cruiser Poignard had been close enough, and her skipper, Citizen Captain Stevens, had been gutsy enough to close with Schaumberg's crippled wreck right at the hyper limit. Poignard had come alongside long enough to take off the battleship's worst injured (including an unconscious Oliver Diamato) before making her own alpha translation. Very little of the cruiser had been left, aside from her hyper generator and Warshawski sails, but that had been enough for her to run.
Schaumberg, with three alpha nodes shot out, had been less fortunate. Citizen Lieutenant Commander Kantor, her assistant engineer, had become her senior officer when Diamato went down, and, according to Stevens' after-action report, he'd believed there was at least a chance he could get his damaged nodes back on-line before the Manties caught up with him.
Obviously, Kantor had been wrong. Six of Citizen Admiral Kellet's thirty-three battleships had trickled home after the battle; PNS Schaumberg had not been one of them. Nor had Porter's flagship, Admiral Quinterra. And those which had made it out had been so mauled that much of their tracking data had been either lost completely or scrambled beyond recovery.
Even so, it should have been possible for the Board of Inquiry to have formed some proper conclusions about what TF 12.3 had run into. Diamato had been too badly injured to be called as a witness, but the tactical officers aboard the handful of surviving ships had to have seen what had happened, and their reports about the new LACs and the godawful missiles which had come screaming up the task force's wake just as the LACs attacked ought to have alerted the Navy that it faced a new, deadly threat.
Except that Citizen Admiral Porter's patrons had demanded (and gotten) a report which avoided the scathing posthumous condemnation Porter's stupidity so amply deserved. Diamato was no longer so i
And Diamato's surviving fellow tac officers had taken the unveiled, threatening hint. They'd volunteered nothing when they faced the Board, and their responses to the questions the Board's members had asked had been limited to an absolute, self-protecting minimum. Furious as he'd been when he heard about it later, Diamato could scarcely blame them. Not a one of them had been above the rank of citizen lieutenant commander, and the board members, the most junior of them a citizen rear admiral, had been even more careful about the questions they'd asked (or hadn't) than the tac officers had been about how they'd answered.
And the whole thing had been conducted with unseemly haste, as well, as if all involved were ashamed and wanted it over and forgotten as quickly as possible. By the time Diamato emerged from the hospital, the deed was done, the report was written, and no one wanted to hear from one furious, heartbroken, embittered citizen commander.
He'd tried to tell them anyway, driven by his agonizing need to discharge his duty as an officer... and to atone for his failure to fulfill Citizen Captain Hall's dying plea to get her people home. She'd counted on him for that, clung to life to charge him with their safety literally with her dying breath. She'd trusted him to get them out... and he hadn't. It wasn't his fault, and he knew it, just as he knew whose fault it had been, but that did nothing to silence the demons of conscience when they came to him in his dreams.
And so, even knowing it was futile, he'd mounted his singlehanded effort to storm the battlements of the official, politically imposed whitewash. He'd filed reports, and they'd been set aside unread. He'd demanded to be heard, and been turned down by his immediate superiors. He'd drafted a personal letter to the commander of the Capital Fleet, and it had been returned unread (officially) with a terse note reminding him that the inquiry had been completed... and that no further communications on the subject were desired or would be received. The warning had been clear, but duty and guilt had refused to accept it. Unable to stop, he'd prepared to go as far up the ladder as it took, a move which undoubtedly would have ended with his own destruction, except for Citizen Secretary McQueen.
He didn't know how the Citizen Secretary of War had heard about his hopeless crusade, but she'd personally summoned him to her office, and in the presence of Ivan Bukato, the senior uniformed officer of the People's Navy, listened to every word he'd had to say. And unlike the Board of Inquiry, she and Bukato had asked incisive, probing questions. Indeed, they'd managed to wring things out of him that he hadn't even realized he knew, although the lack of hard scan data or tac recordings to support his recollections had limited the reliance which could be placed upon them. At the end, McQueen had sent him to an office at the Octagon and had him write out a fresh, formal report for her eyes only.
Diamato had sensed McQueen's initial dislike for him. Only later had he realized that it resulted from the fact that she'd perused his perso
But his outrage and determination to get the truth across had been enough to erase her dislike. If he'd needed any proof of that, the assignment to command Sherman while his rehab therapy was still considerably short of complete would have wiped them away. Perhaps even more to the point had been the way in which she'd urged him, without ever explicitly saying so, to abate his charge at the windmill of the Hancock whitewash. It had been weeks before he discovered what had actually produced that report... and realized McQueen's veiled warning was probably all that had prevented his disappearance as "an enemy of the People." After all, if Porter's patrons were prepared to go as far as suppressing critically important tactical data to protect themselves, they were undoubtedly capable of using the full power of State Security and a set of trumped-up charges to eliminate a single, troublesome citizen commander.
So instead of being disappeared, here he sat on the bridge of his splendid new ship, watching on the tactical display as the other units of a new task force gathered for a fresh offensive against the Manties. It was a proud moment, as well it ought to have been, but he could not suppress a shiver whenever he remembered the blazing madness of Second Hancock.